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Cass R. Sunstein: The Obama I Know

2008-03-05T11:36:00.000-08:00

Not so long ago, the phone rang in my office. It was Barack Obama. For more than a decade, Obama was my colleague at the University of Chicago Law School.

He is also a friend. But since his election to the Senate, he does not exactly call every day.

On this occasion, he had an important topic to discuss: the controversy over President George W. Bush's warrantless surveillance of international telephone calls between Americans and suspected terrorists. I had written a short essay suggesting that the surveillance might be lawful. Before taking a public position, Obama wanted to talk the problem through.

In the space of about 20 minutes, he and I investigated the legal details. He asked me to explore all sorts of issues: the President's power as commander-in-chief, the Constitution's protection against unreasonable searches and seizures, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the Authorization for Use of Military Force and more.

Obama wanted to consider the best possible defence of what Bush had done. To every argument I made, he listened and offered a counter-argument. After the issue had been exhausted, Obama said that he thought the programme was illegal, but now had a better understanding of both sides. He thanked me for my time.

This was a pretty amazing conversation, not only because of Obama's mastery of the legal details, but also because many prominent Democratic leaders had already blasted the Bush initiative as blatantly illegal. He did not want to take a public position until he had listened to, and explored, what might be said on the other side.

This is the Barack Obama I have known for nearly 15 years -- a careful and even-handed analyst of law and policy, unusually attentive to multiple points of view.

The University of Chicago Law School is by far the most conservative of the great American law schools. It helped to provide the academic foundations for many positions of the Reagan administration.

But at the University of Chicago, Obama is liked and admired by Republicans and Democrats alike. Some of the local Reagan enthusiasts are Obama supporters. Why? It doesn't hurt that he's a great guy, with a personal touch and a lot of warmth. It certainly helps that he is exceptionally able.

But niceness and ability are only part of the story. Obama also has a genuinely independent mind, he's a terrific listener and he goes wherever reason takes him.

Those of us who have long known Obama are impressed and not a little amazed by his rhetorical skills. Who could have expected that our colleague, a teacher of law, is also able to inspire large crowds?

The Obama we know is no rhetorician; he shines not because he can move people, but because of his problem-solving abilities, his creativity and his attention to detail.

In recent weeks, his speaking talents, and the cult-like atmosphere that occasionally surrounds him, have led people to wonder whether there is substance behind the plea for "change" - whether the soaring phrases might disguise a kind of emptiness and vagueness. But nothing could be further from the truth. He is most comfortable in the domain of policy and detail.

I do not deny that skeptics are raising legitimate questions. After all, Obama has served in the Senate for a short period (less than four years) and he has little managerial experience. Is he really equipped to lead the most powerful nation in the world?

Obama speaks of "change", but will he be able to produce large-scale changes in a short time? What if he fails? An independent issue is that all the enthusiasm might serve to insulate him from criticisms and challenges on the part of his own advisers -- and, in view of his relative youth, criticisms and challenges are exactly what he requires.

Fortunately, the candidate's campaign proposals offer strong and encouraging clues about how he would govern; what makes them distinctive is that they borrow sensible ideas from all sides.

He is strongly committed to helping the disadvantaged, but his University of Chicago background shows; he appreciates the virtues and power of free markets. In this sense, he is not only focused on details but is also a uniter, both by inclination and on principle.

Transparency and accountability matter greatly to him; they are a defining feature of his proposals. With respect to the mortgage crisis, credit cards and the broader debate over credit markets, Obama rejects heavy-handed regulation and insists above all on disclosure, so that consumers will know exactly what they are getting.

Expect transparency to be a central theme in any Obama administration, as a check on government and the private sector alike. It is highly revealing that Obama worked with Republican (and arch-conservative) Tom Coburn to produce legislation creating a publicly searchable database of all federal spending.

Obama's healthcare plan places a premium on cutting costs and on making care affordable, without requiring adults to purchase health insurance. (He would require mandatory coverage only for children.) Republican legislators are unlikely to support a mandatory approach, and his plan can be understood, in part, as a recognition of political realities.

But it is also a reflection of his keen interest in freedom of choice. He seeks universal coverage not through unenforceable mandates but through giving people good options.

It should not be surprising that in terms of helping low-income workers, Obama has long been enthusiastic about the Earned Income Tax Credit -- an approach, pioneered by Republicans, that supplements wages but does not threaten to throw people out of work.

But Obama is no a compromiser; he does not try to steer between the poles (or the polls). "Triangulation" has no appeal for him. Both internationally and domestically, he is willing to think big and to be bold. He publicly opposed the war in Iraq at a time when opposition was unpopular.

He favors high-level meetings with some of the world's worst dictators. He would rethink the embargo against Cuba.

He proposes a $150 billion research budget for climate change. He wants to hold an unprecedented national auction for the right to emit greenhouse gases. He has offered an ambitious plan for promoting technological innovation, calling for a national broadband policy, embracing network neutrality, and proposing a reform of the patent system.

His campaign has spoken of moving toward "iPod Government" -- an effort to rethink public services and national regulations in ways that will make things far simpler and more user-friendly.

These are points about policies and substance. As president, Obama would set a new tone in US politics. He refuses to demonize his political opponents; deep in his heart, I believe, he doesn't even think of them as opponents. It would not be surprising to find Republicans and independents prominent in his administration.

Obama wants to know what ideas are likely to work, not whether a Democrat or a Republican is responsible for them. Recall the most memorable passage from his keynote address at the 2004 Democratic Convention: "We coach Little League [baseball] in the blue [Democratic-voting] states, and, yes, we've got some gay friends in the red states. There are patriots who opposed the war in Iraq, and there are patriots who supported the war in Iraq."

In his book The Audacity of Hope, he asks for a politics that accepts "the possibility that the other side might sometimes have a point". Remarking that ordinary Americans "don't always understand the arguments between right and left, conservative and liberal", Obama wants politicians "to catch up with them,"

After he received an email from a pro-life doctor, Obama recalls how he softened his website's harsh rhetoric on abortion, writing: "[T]hat night, before I went to bed, I said a prayer of my own -- that I might extend the same presumption of good faith to others that the doctor had extended to me."

In short, Obama's own approach is insistently charitable. He assumes decency and good faith on the part of those who disagree with him. And he wants to hear what they have to say. Both in substance and in tone, Obama questions the conventional political distinctions between "the left" and "the right". To the extent that he is attracting support from Republicans and independents, it is largely for this reason.

From knowing Obama for many years, I have no doubts about his ability to lead. He knows a great deal, and he is a quick learner. Even better, he knows what he does not know, and there is no question that he would assemble an accomplished, experienced team of advisers. His brilliant administration of his own campaign provides helpful evidence here.

But there is some fragility to the public fervor that envelops him. Crowds and cults can be fickle, and if some of his decisions disappoint, or turn out badly, his support will diminish. Some people think it might even collapse.

My own concern involves the importance of internal debate. The greatest American presidents (above all Lincoln and Roosevelt) benefited from robust dialogue and from advisers who avoided saying, "how wonderful you are," and were willing to say: "Mr President, your thinking about this is all wrong."

Because Obama himself is exceptionally able, and because so many people are treating him as a near-messiah, his advisers might be too deferential, too unwilling to question. There is a real risk here. But I believe that his humility, and his intense desire to seek out dissenting views, will prove crucial safeguards.

In the 2000 campaign, Bush proclaimed himself a "uniter, not a divider", only to turn out to be the most divisive President in memory. Because of his own certainty, and his lack of curiosity about what others might think, Bush polarized the nation. Many of his most ambitious plans went nowhere as a result.

As president, Barack Obama would be a genuine uniter. If he proves able to achieve great things, for his nation and for the world, it will be above all for that reason.

McCain on Iraq: 10,000 years

2008-02-11T19:10:00.000-08:00

Yes We Can

2008-02-05T09:08:00.000-08:00

One for the underdogs

2008-02-03T21:31:00.000-08:00

AP Photo

This is why they play the games, instead of letting the pundits and "experts" set the narrative and call the shots. Despite the odds, the New York Giants and their coaching staff knew they could beat the New England Patriots, if only they could stay close and not be swept away by someone else's narrative.

I think the same could be said for politics and the Democratic presidential nomination process. We'll see if Hillary can overcome the front-runner and mount a similar comeback against the media's darling, just the like the Giants did tonight.

Congrats to the Giants, their coaching staff, their fans, and the great city of New York. Congrats also to the Patriots for their fine season.

W's Legacy

2007-12-04T23:30:00.000-08:00

Between some 80,000 and 2,000,000 civilians killed.

Some 4,400,000 Iraqi refugees.

Some 3882 American and 306 coalition troops killed.

Over 28,000 American troops wounded.

Skyrocketing rates of troop suicides and mental health problems.

A Congressional Budget Office estimate of a total financial cost for the two wars of over $2,400,000,000,000, with Iraq comprising 80% of the total, which is a 50% increase in the cost estimate since the previous CBO estimate, which was already up just a tad from Bush's 2003 claim that Iraq would cost "only" $50,000,000,000. Yes, that makes for an underestimate in the total cost by a factor of nearly forty. Or I should say made. You can now nearly double it.

As Bob Herbert explains, in the New York Times:

A report prepared for the Democratic majority on the Joint Economic Committee of the House and Senate warns that without a significant change of course in Iraq, the long-term cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan could head into the vicinity of $3.5 trillion. The vast majority of those expenses would be for Iraq.

I like to write these numbers out: that would be $3,500,000,000,000. Mostly for an immoral, illegal, unjustified war of aggression that has wrought hell on an innocent people, and is now expected to accomplish nothing. Depending, of course, on your priorities. Depending, of course, on your loyalties.

As Herbert continues:

Priorities don’t get much more twisted. A country that can’t find the money to provide health coverage for its children, or to rebuild the city of New Orleans, or to create a first-class public school system, is flushing whole generations worth of cash into the bottomless pit of a failed and endless war.

We don't own this war, it owns us.

President Bush’s formal funding requests for Iraq have already exceeded $600 billion. In addition to that, the report offers estimates of the war’s “hidden costs” from its beginning to 2017: the long-term costs of treating the wounded and disabled; interest and other costs associated with borrowing to finance the war; the money needed to repair or replace military equipment; the increased costs of military recruitment and retention; and such difficult to gauge but very real costs as the loss of productivity from those who have been killed or wounded.

And I can't add anything better than what Herbert does, to close:

Seriously. How long do we want this madness to last?

Another "Decider" Disaster

2007-12-04T22:05:00.000-08:00

At the White House news conference yesterday, The Chicago Tribune’s Mark Silva gingerly snuck up on a state-of-mind question.

“I can’t help but read your body language this morning, Mr. President,” he said. “You seem somehow dispirited, somewhat dispirited.”

W. did look like a kid who’d just had his toys taken away. But he acted humorously exasperated, as he always does when the talk turns introspective.

“This is like, all of a sudden, it’s like Psychology 101, you know?” he said, as reporters laughed.

The reporters pressed on about whether the president was troubled about a possible “credibility gap” with the American people, given that the facts had failed him on Iraq and Iran and that Harry Reid had charged that “the president is not leveling with the American people” on war spending.

Even though Norman Podhoretz is conjuring up a “Seven Days in December” spy thriller scenario in which the intelligence agencies colluded to sabotage the president and prevent him from the noble mission of air strikes on Iran, W. insisted he felt “pretty good about life.”

He said that the breathtaking and embarrassing reversal in the National Intelligence Estimate about Iran’s nuclear capability — from “high confidence” in 2005 that the mullahs were developing a nuke to “high confidence” that they stopped the program in 2003 — somehow made it clear that he was right.

If W. can shape the intelligence to match his faith-based beliefs, as with Iraq, then he will believe the intelligence — no matter how incredible it is.

If he can’t shape it to match his beliefs, as with Iran, then he will disregard the intelligence — no matter how credible it is.

Even though Sy Hersh claims that the top echelon of the White House has long known of the conclusion that Iran had stopped its nuke program, and that Dick Cheney “has kept his foot on the neck of that report,” the president says he was briefed on it only last week. Others conspiratorially speculate that the president had to have green-lighted the report to take the air out of the hawks’ Iran push.

Just because the facts on which he based his white-hot rhetoric about Iran possibly sparking World War III have been debunked, W. said with his usual twisted logic, why should his policy change?

Indeed, John Bolton, who must have been paying attention in his Psych 101 class, argued to Wolf Blitzer that the intelligence analysts “got Iraq wrong and they’re overcompensating by understating the potential threat from Iran.”

George Tenet helped hawks like Mr. Cheney and Mr. Bolton overstate the case on Iraq W.M.D. Then, when things went wrong, W., Cheney and Condi made Mr. Tenet the fall guy.

After getting Iraq wrong and Iran wrong in 2005 and almost every other big thing wrong since the nation began spending billions every year on intelligence, the burned spooks may not have wanted to play the patsy again while W., Cheney and the neocons beat the drums for an Iran invasion.

Now the apple-polishing George Tenet is gone. The man who oversaw the new estimate is Tom Fingar, a former State Department intelligence officer who was smart and brave enough to object to the cooked-up intelligence on Iraqi W.M.D.

“The way they used to do business was to write estimates in a way that couched things so they said, ‘We may not always be right, but we’re never wrong,’ ” said Tim Weiner, the reporter for The Times who wrote the award-winning history of the C.I.A., “Legacy of Ashes.” “This is a slam-dunk reversal, admitting error. Now, when they play poker, they show their hands to each other, so they don’t get another curveball.”

The president, who has shut out reality for seven years, justified continuing in his world of ideological illusion by saying that he would not be “blinded” to the realities of the world. You can’t get more Orwellian than that.

“And so,” W. concluded triumphantly, and nonsensically, “kind of Psychology 101 ain’t working.”

W. loves to act as though psychology is voodoo even though his whole misbegotten foreign policy has been conducted from his gut, by checking the body language of his inner circle and looking into the hearts and souls of dictatorial leaders.

If I were looking at the latest fiasco from a Psych 101 point of view, I’d say it was another daddy issue for W.

Poppy Bush, who was once C.I.A. director, loved the agency and liked to sign notes: “Head Spook.” The C.I.A. headquarters bear his name.

W., by contrast, has voiced contempt for the intelligence community. In 2004, he dismissed a pessimistic National Intelligence Estimate that didn’t match his sunny vision of the Iraq occupation, saying that the analysts were “just guessing as to what the conditions might be like.”

When W.’s history is written, he will be seen as the rebellious teenager crashing the family station wagon into his father’s three most cherished spots — diplomacy, intelligence and the Gulf.

The Case For Hillary

2007-11-15T10:04:00.000-08:00

I believe that the reason the Republicans have promoted the talking point that Hillary is unelectable is that they fear that more than any other candidate she can create a majority coalition, win and govern. They fear more than loss in one election; they fear the end of the Republican era beginning with Nixon. They know that she has the knowledge, skill and ability to govern. They know that she has already taken everything they can throw against her and is still standing.

Just as the disintegration of the Democrats brought about the rise of the Republicans, the collapse of the Republicans has created an opening for the Democrats. But the Democrats have been victims of their own false euphoria, sanctimony and illusions before....The Democrats at key junctures have been seduced by the illusion of anti-politics to their own detriment. Anti-politics upholds a self-righteous ideal of purity that somehow political conflict can be transcended on angels' wings. The consequences on the right of an assumption of moral superiority and hubris are apparent. Their plight stands as a cautionary tale, but not only as an object lesson for them. Still, the Republican will to power remains ferocious. The hard struggle will require the most capable political leadership, willing to undertake the most difficult tasks, and grace under pressure.

John Wayne is dead

2007-09-21T18:43:00.000-07:00

Has anyone noticed that our decider-in-chief no longer plays dress up? He hasn't done so for a while and that's no small thing. It's a phenomenon that came and went almost without comment in the media.

I don't remember the first time I noticed that George W. Bush liked to dress up. It could have been in May 2003 when he strutted across that carrier deck all togged out to announce that "major combat operations had ended" in Iraq, or when he started appearing before massed, hoo-ahing troops in military-style jackets with "George W. Bush, Commander in Chief" hand-stitched across the chest, or when he served that inedible turkey in Baghdad. I can't tell you either when it first registered that he was visibly enjoying himself "in uniform"; or when it occurred to me that this was not just play-acting, but actual play of a very young and un-presidential sort; or when I first noticed that, "in uniform," he looked strangely like a life-sized version of the original 12-inch G.I. Joe doll. ("Action figure" was the term first invented for it, because who wanted a boy to think he had a Barbie, even if it came with its own "beach assault fatigue shirt" and "bivouac pup-tent set"?)

Here's something I suspect goes with the above. With rare exceptions, the fiercest post-9/11 "warriors" of this administration were never in the military. They had, in the Vice President's words, "other priorities in the '60s." Hence that old (and not very useful) term "chickenhawks." On the other hand, a surprising number of Democrats in Congress had actually served in the military – not that, from Senators Max Cleland to Jack Reed, it did them much political good. Americans have preferred, it seems, to hear their war stories from the men who sat out the wars.

The reason, I suspect, is simple enough. I'm about George Bush's age. Many of our fathers, like his, fought in World War II. In the late '50s and early '60s, my childhood years, that generation of fathers – the ones I knew, anyway – were remarkably silent about their actual war experiences, but to us kids that made no difference. All we had to do was walk to the nearest neighborhood movie theater, catch Merrill's Marauders, or some other war flick, and it was obvious enough just what heroic things they had accomplished. George Bush and I both sat in the dark, enveloped in the same American mythic tradition – already then a couple of hundred years old – that I've called "victory culture"; we knew Americans deserved to, and would, triumph against savage enemies out on some distant frontier; we both thrilled to the sound of the bugle as the blue coats charged; we both felt the chills run up our spine as, with the Marine Hymn welling up, the Marines advanced victoriously while "The End" flashed on the screen.

Here's the difference: I left that movie theater in the Vietnam era. Much of the Bush administration seems to have remained in the dark. There, it seems, they sat out defeat and emerged strangely untouched, as I've written elsewhere, as the Peter Pans of American war play. While, in the 1980s, G.I. Joe shrunk to 3-inch size to squeeze into the Star-Wars universe and began fighting fantasy villains, while others absorbed the Vietnam lesson, they arrived in the post-9/11 moment with a still untarnished dream of American triumphalism. And that is what Americans wanted – and many, against all odds, still want – to hear.

The President and his top officials were the ones who could still embody the idea of a "good war," both enjoying the performance themselves and making it seem thrilling; and, for some years, a remarkable number of Americans suspended Vietnam-style disbelief and went with the flow. Under the circumstances, a surprising number still do. It just turned out – and who in the "reality-based" world can truly be surprised – that they couldn't translate their all-American fantasy world, or the President's dress-up dreams, into reality. Fighting actual wars proved a painfully different matter.

Losing Our Souls

2007-09-21T18:02:00.000-07:00

Thomas Hobbes said that "hell is truth seen too late."

What Colin Powell had to say to GQ magazine in a recent interview is a truth that needs to be heard:

Terrorism, said Powell, is not a mortal threat to America.

"What is the greatest threat facing us now?" Powell asked. "People will say it's terrorism. But are there any terrorists in the world who can change the American way of life or our political system? No. Can they knock down a building? Yes. Can they kill somebody? Yes. But can they change us? No. Only we can change ourselves. So what is the great threat we are facing?"

History and common sense teach that Powell speaks truth.

Since 9/11, 100,000 Americans have been murdered – as many as we lost in Vietnam, Korea and Iraq combined. Yet, not one of these murders was the work of an Islamic terrorist, and all of them, terrible as they are, did not imperil the survival of our republic.

Terrorists can blow up our buildings, assassinate our leaders, and bomb our malls and stadiums. They cannot destroy us. Assume the worst. Terrorists smuggle an atom bomb into New York harbor or into Washington, D.C., and detonate it.

Horrible and horrifying as that would be – perhaps 100,000 dead and wounded – it would not mean the end of the United States. It would more likely mean the end of Iran, or whatever nation at which the United States chose to direct its rage and retribution.

Consider. Between 1942 and 1945, Germany and Japan, nations not one-tenth the size of the United States, saw their cities firebombed, and their soldiers and civilians slaughtered in the millions. Japan lost an empire. Germany lost a third of its territory. Both were put under military occupation. Yet, 15 years later, Germany and Japan were the second and third most prosperous nations on Earth, the dynamos of their respective continents, Europe and Asia.

Powell's point is not that terrorism is not a threat. It is that the terror threat must be seen in perspective, that we ought not frighten ourselves to death with our own propaganda, that we cannot allow fear of terror to monopolize our every waking hour or cause us to give up our freedom.

For all the blather of a restored caliphate, the "Islamofascists," as the neocons call them, cannot create or run a modern state, or pose a mortal threat to America. The GNP of the entire Arab world is not equal to Spain's. Oil aside, its exports are equal to Finland's.

Afghanistan and Sudan, under Islamist regimes, were basket cases. Despite the comparisons with Nazi Germany, Iran is unable to build modern fighters or warships and has an economy one-twentieth that of the United States, at best. While we lack the troops to invade Iran, three times the size of Iraq, the U.S. Air Force and Navy could, in weeks, smash Iran's capacity to make war, blockade it and reduce its population to destitution. Should Iran develop a nuclear weapon and use it on us or on Israel, it would invite annihilation.

As a threat, Iran is not remotely in the same league with the Soviet Union of Stalin, Khrushchev and Brezhnev, or Mao's China, or Nazi Germany, or Imperial Japan, or even Mussolini's Italy.

And why would Tehran, which has not launched a war since the revolution in 1979, start a war with an America with 10,000 nuclear weapons? If the Iranians are so suicidal, why have they not committed suicide in 30 years by attacking us or Israel?

What makes war with Iran folly is that an all-out war could lead to a break-up of that country, with Persians, Azeris, Kurds, Arabs and Baluchis going their separate ways, creating fertile enclaves for al-Qaeda recruitment and training.

In our time, Pakistan, Ethiopia and Czechoslovakia have split apart. The Soviet Union and Yugoslavia have broken up into two dozen nations. Terrorism had nothing to do with it. Tribalism had everything to do with it.

Race, ethnicity and religion are the fault lines along which nations like Iraq are coming apart. If America ends, it will not be the work of an Osama bin Laden.

Bush always knew there were no Iraq WMDs

2007-09-05T20:13:00.000-07:00

Salon exclusive: Two former CIA officers say the president squelched top-secret intelligence, and a briefing by George Tenet, months before invading Iraq.

By Sidney Blumenthal

Sep. 06, 2007 | On Sept. 18, 2002, CIA director George Tenet briefed President Bush in the Oval Office on top-secret intelligence that Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction, according to two former senior CIA officers. Bush dismissed as worthless this information from the Iraqi foreign minister, a member of Saddam's inner circle, although it turned out to be accurate in every detail. Tenet never brought it up again.

Nor was the intelligence included in the National Intelligence Estimate of October 2002, which stated categorically that Iraq possessed WMD. No one in Congress was aware of the secret intelligence that Saddam had no WMD as the House of Representatives and the Senate voted, a week after the submission of the NIE, on the Authorization for Use of Military Force in Iraq. The information, moreover, was not circulated within the CIA among those agents involved in operations to prove whether Saddam had WMD.

On April 23, 2006, CBS's "60 Minutes" interviewed Tyler Drumheller, the former CIA chief of clandestine operations for Europe, who disclosed that the agency had received documentary intelligence from Naji Sabri, Saddam's foreign minister, that Saddam did not have WMD. "We continued to validate him the whole way through," said Drumheller. "The policy was set. The war in Iraq was coming, and they were looking for intelligence to fit into the policy, to justify the policy."

Now two former senior CIA officers have confirmed Drumheller's account to me and provided the background to the story of how the information that might have stopped the invasion of Iraq was twisted in order to justify it. They described what Tenet said to Bush about the lack of WMD, and how Bush responded, and noted that Tenet never shared Sabri's intelligence with then Secretary of State Colin Powell. According to the former officers, the intelligence was also never shared with the senior military planning the invasion, which required U.S. soldiers to receive medical shots against the ill effects of WMD and to wear protective uniforms in the desert.

Instead, said the former officials, the information was distorted in a report written to fit the preconception that Saddam did have WMD programs. That false and restructured report was passed to Richard Dearlove, chief of the British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), who briefed Prime Minister Tony Blair on it as validation of the cause for war.

Secretary of State Powell, in preparation for his presentation of evidence of Saddam's WMD to the United Nations Security Council on Feb. 5, 2003, spent days at CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., and had Tenet sit directly behind him as a sign of credibility. But Tenet, according to the sources, never told Powell about existing intelligence that there were no WMD, and Powell's speech was later revealed to be a series of falsehoods.

Both the French intelligence service and the CIA paid Sabri hundreds of thousands of dollars (at least $200,000 in the case of the CIA) to give them documents on Saddam's WMD programs. "The information detailed that Saddam may have wished to have a program, that his engineers had told him they could build a nuclear weapon within two years if they had fissible material, which they didn't, and that they had no chemical or biological weapons," one of the former CIA officers told me.

On the eve of Sabri's appearance at the United Nations in September 2002 to present Saddam's case, the officer in charge of this operation met in New York with a "cutout" who had debriefed Sabri for the CIA. Then the officer flew to Washington, where he met with CIA deputy director John McLaughlin, who was "excited" about the report. Nonetheless, McLaughlin expressed his reservations. He said that Sabri's information was at odds with "our best source." That source was code-named "Curveball," later exposed as a fabricator, con man and former Iraqi taxi driver posing as a chemical engineer.

The next day, Sept. 18, Tenet briefed Bush on Sabri. "Tenet told me he briefed the president personally," said one of the former CIA officers. According to Tenet, Bush's response was to call the information "the same old thing." Bush insisted it was simply what Saddam wanted him to think. "The president had no interest in the intelligence," said the CIA officer. The other officer said, "Bush didn't give a fuck about the intelligence. He had his mind made up."

But the CIA officers working on the Sabri case kept collecting information. "We checked on everything he told us." French intelligence eavesdropped on his telephone conversations and shared them with the CIA. These taps "validated" Sabri's claims, according to one of the CIA officers. The officers brought this material to the attention of the newly formed Iraqi Operations Group within the CIA. But those in charge of the IOG were on a mission to prove that Saddam did have WMD and would not give credit to anything that came from the French. "They kept saying the French were trying to undermine the war," said one of the CIA officers.

The officers continued to insist on the significance of Sabri's information, but one of Tenet's deputies told them, "You haven't figured this out yet. This isn't about intelligence. It's about regime change."

The CIA officers on the case awaited the report they had submitted on Sabri to be circulated back to them, but they never received it. They learned later that a new report had been written. "It was written by someone in the agency, but unclear who or where, it was so tightly controlled. They knew what would please the White House. They knew what the king wanted," one of the officers told me.

That report contained a false preamble stating that Saddam was "aggressively and covertly developing" nuclear weapons and that he already possessed chemical and biological weapons. "Totally out of whack," said one of the CIA officers. "The first [para]graph of an intelligence report is the most important and most read and colors the rest of the report." He pointed out that the case officer who wrote the initial report had not written the preamble and the new memo. "That's not what the original memo said."

The report with the misleading introduction was given to Dearlove of MI6, who briefed the prime minister. "They were given a scaled-down version of the report," said one of the CIA officers. "It was a summary given for liaison, with the sourcing taken out. They showed the British the statement Saddam was pursuing an aggressive program, and rewrote the report to attempt to support that statement. It was insidious. Blair bought it." "Blair was duped," said the other CIA officer. "He was shown the altered report."

The information provided by Sabri was considered so sensitive that it was never shown to those who assembled the NIE on Iraqi WMD. Later revealed to be utterly wrong, the NIE read: "We judge that Iraq has continued its weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programs in defiance of UN resolutions and restrictions. Baghdad has chemical and biological weapons as well as missiles with ranges in excess of UN restrictions; if left unchecked, it probably will have a nuclear weapon during this decade."

In the congressional debate over the Authorization for the Use of Military Force, even those voting against it gave credence to the notion that Saddam possessed WMD. Even a leading opponent such as Sen. Bob Graham, then the Democratic chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, who had instigated the production of the NIE, declared in his floor speech on Oct. 12, 2002, "Saddam Hussein's regime has chemical and biological weapons and is trying to get nuclear capacity." Not a single senator contested otherwise. None of them had an inkling of the Sabri intelligence.

The CIA officers assigned to Sabri still argued within the agency that his information must be taken seriously, but instead the administration preferred to rely on Curveball. Drumheller learned from the German intelligence service that held Curveball that it considered him and his claims about WMD to be highly unreliable. But the CIA's Weapons Intelligence, Nonproliferation, and Arms Control Center (WINPAC) insisted that Curveball was credible because what he said was supposedly congruent with available public information.

For two months, Drumheller fought against the use of Curveball, raising the red flag that he was likely a fraud, as he turned out to be. "Oh, my! I hope that's not true," said Deputy Director McLaughlin, according to Drumheller's book "On the Brink," published in 2006. When Curveball's information was put into Bush's Jan. 28, 2003, State of the Union address, McLaughlin and Tenet allowed it to pass into the speech. "From three Iraqi defectors," Bush declared, "we know that Iraq, in the late 1990s, had several mobile biological weapons labs ... Saddam Hussein has not disclosed these facilities. He's given no evidence that he has destroyed them." In fact, there was only one Iraqi source -- Curveball -- and there were no labs.

When the mobile weapons labs were inserted into the draft of Powell's United Nations speech, Drumheller strongly objected again and believed that the error had been removed. He was shocked watching Powell's speech. "We have firsthand descriptions of biological weapons factories on wheels and on rails," Powell announced. Without the reference to the mobile weapons labs, there was no image of a threat.

Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, Powell's chief of staff, and Powell himself later lamented that they had not been warned about Curveball. And McLaughlin told the Washington Post in 2006, "If someone had made these doubts clear to me, I would not have permitted the reporting to be used in Secretary Powell's speech." But, in fact, Drumheller's caution was ignored.

As war appeared imminent, the CIA officers on the Sabri case tried to arrange his defection in order to demonstrate that he stood by his information. But he would not leave without bringing out his entire family. "He dithered," said one former CIA officer. And the war came before his escape could be handled.

Tellingly, Sabri's picture was never put on the deck of playing cards of former Saddam officials to be hunted down, a tacit acknowledgment of his covert relationship with the CIA. Today, Sabri lives in Qatar.

In 2005, the Silberman-Robb commission investigating intelligence in the Iraq war failed to interview the case officer directly involved with Sabri; instead its report blamed the entire WMD fiasco on "groupthink" at the CIA. "They didn't want to trace this back to the White House," said the officer.

On Feb. 5, 2004, Tenet delivered a speech at Georgetown University that alluded to Sabri and defended his position on the existence of WMD, which, even then, he contended would still be found. "Several sensitive reports crossed my desk from two sources characterized by our foreign partners as established and reliable," he said. "The first from a source who had direct access to Saddam and his inner circle" -- Naji Sabri -- "said Iraq was not in the possession of a nuclear weapon. However, Iraq was aggressively and covertly developing such a weapon."

Then Tenet claimed with assurance, "The same source said that Iraq was stockpiling chemical weapons." He explained that this intelligence had been central to his belief in the reason for war. "As this information and other sensitive information came across my desk, it solidified and reinforced the judgments that we had reached in my own view of the danger posed by Saddam Hussein and I conveyed this view to our nation's leaders." (Tenet doesn't mention Sabri in his recently published memoir, "At the Center of the Storm.")

But where were the WMD? "Now, I'm sure you're all asking, 'Why haven't we found the weapons?' I've told you the search must continue and it will be difficult."

On Sept. 8, 2006, three Republican senators on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence -- Orrin Hatch, Saxby Chambliss and Pat Roberts -- signed a letter attempting to counter Drumheller's revelation about Sabri on "60 Minutes": "All of the information about this case so far indicates that the information from this source was that Iraq did have WMD programs." The Republicans also quoted Tenet, who had testified before the committee in July 2006 that Drumheller had "mischaracterized" the intelligence. Still, Drumheller stuck to his guns, telling Reuters, "We have differing interpretations, and I think mine's right."

One of the former senior CIA officers told me that despite the certitude of the three Republican senators, the Senate committee never had the original memo on Sabri. "The committee never got that report," he said. "The material was hidden or lost, and because it was a restricted case, a lot of it was done in hard copy. The whole thing was fogged up, like Curveball."

While one Iraqi source told the CIA that there were no WMD, information that was true but distorted to prove the opposite, another Iraqi source was a fabricator whose lies were eagerly embraced. "The real tragedy is that they had a good source that they misused," said one of the former CIA officers. "The fact is there was nothing there, no threat. But Bush wanted to hear what he wanted to hear."

2007-08-27T18:16:00.000-07:00

2007-08-25T01:02:00.001-07:00

Anyone who has proclaimed violence his method inexorably must choose lying as his principle.

~Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

War wihout end

2007-08-25T00:54:00.000-07:00

DIGG THIS

George Bush, famous for outlandish claims that have no bearing on reality, has outdone himself by claiming that the problem with Vietnam was that the U.S. withdrew its troops rather than fighting harder and longer.

In a speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars, he didn't say how long the U.S. should have stayed, but he did claim that the reason for the bloodshed in Cambodia, and the prison camps in Vietnam following withdrawal, was not the war itself, but the failure to continue the war without end.

Presumably, then, if Bush were president for life back then, we would still be in Vietnam, the draft would still be in place, and the bloodshed would have continued for decades.

My, what a vision! You might think this is madness. In fact, it is the reductio ad absurdum of a particular worldview that he and his friends have adopted.

Along the same lines, a few years ago, William Bennett, the former drug czar turned hyper-gambler, said that we shouldn't have abandoned alcohol prohibition. It was working just fine. And after it was repealed, drinking went up. Had we stayed the course, he said, we would be a healthier and more moral society.

Many on the left say we should not have abandoned the 55mph speed limit. Things were going just fine. The repeal has made our roads less safe and increased people's dedication to the car and made us more dependent on foreign oil.

Maybe we shouldn't have backed away from 90% income tax rates. Now the rich get richer, as less of their earnings are tossed to the wind.

Maybe we can do the same about the wage and price controls as during Hoover’s and FDR’s New Deals – why the heck did we abandon the war on low prices? The same goes for wage and price controls under Nixon in the early seventies – why did we just walk away from the war on high prices?

For that matter, let's go back to the Civil War, especially given the numbers of Confederate flags that still fly outside rural homes south of the Mason Dixon line. The military occupation and anti-insurgency was going well, and what did we do? We cut and ran, and left a whole region to languish in racism and hate.

It's interesting how those who believe in force as an article of faith eventually go the whole way, believing that the lessening of force is never the answer, and that all the problems in the world call for one and only one answer: ever more scary threats of violence. Force, for this crowd, is the great organizing principle of society, the answer to all existing problems now, in the past, and in the future. It becomes for them the overriding social and political salve, and there are no considerations that can possibly refute this contention.

We saw the extreme result of this mentality in the Soviet Union, which pursued the path of force for 72 years, and blamed all existing failures not on socialism but on the failure to impose this system without any misgivings or regrets. A dictator with ultimate power can impose such a system until the whole of society crumbles into a heap, and still not be willing to face the errors of his ways. Force is an article of faith. To embrace freedom means to concede the limits of power.

In the case of Vietnam, there would have been no such thing as the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia had the U.S. not embraced Pol Pot. In the same way, al-Qaeda got its start during the Cold War because the U.S. saw the radical Islamicists as anti-communist allies. The extremists in Afghanistan were once seen as glorious freedom fighters. Their training camps, guns, and furnished caves were provided courtesy of the U.S. taxpayer.

So it is in Iraq today. After the U.S. overthrew Saddam's government, the plan was to jump-start a new central government under U.S. control. That's when the fighting started. What group would control it? There is no answer to that question, even today. The U.S. has always thought the Shiites should run the show, religious law and all. But that plan hasn't worked out.

On the day that Bush delivered his speech about the coming dawn in Iraq, 15 Americans died in combat. Another 11 were seriously wounded from a suicide bomb. On the Iraqi side, 154 died and another 175 were wounded. The death parade marched through Baiji, Baghdad, Tikrit, Iskandariya, Hawija, Flaifel, and Tal Afar. The mayor of al-Kharba was assassinated.

This was in one day! Now, to the critical question that vexes all political and social science: why? I don't mean the proximate cause. I mean the ultimate cause. If you are Bush, the answer comes as a matter of faith: these unruly people need more force. When that doesn't work, the answer is additional force. When that doesn't work, we need more force still. And so on, war without end.

There is no refuting these claims since the matter of cause and effect requires a slightly complicated set of deductions. It is the same with all matters of government control. It was prohibition of the alcohol trade, not alcohol itself, that generated violence. It was price controls, not the market pressure for high and low prices, that caused economic problems. It was the 55-mile-per-hour speed limit that made criminals out of 100% of drivers, not the normal propensity to want to get where you are going at a reasonable speed.

And so it is with Iraq. The desire to get rid of the foreign military occupier is a universal feature of political history. To recognize the failure of force is to admit that the state cannot accomplish all that it claims it can accomplish. It is to admit the big lie. Doing so requires humility, a willingness to own up to mistakes, a desire to face reality and to think about the long term. These are traits that the state and its managers do not possess in large supply. Witness: George Bush.

No, Iraq will not blossom like a rose garden the day after U.S. troops leave. There will be bloodshed, and how much we cannot know. But the critical thing is that these people will be governing themselves, and the critical thing that prevents progress today – the presence of the foreign occupier – will be gone. The solution is imperfect, to be sure, but it is better than the opposite of turning the entire world into a prison camp run by the U.S. government.

How Rove could be Rove

2007-08-14T13:21:00.000-07:00

"Savviness--that quality of being shrewd, practical, well-informed, perceptive, ironic, 'with it,' and unsentimental in all things political--is, in a sense, their professional religion. They make a cult of it. And it was this cult that Karl Rove understood and exploited for political gain."

Conservatives think the ideology of the Washington press corps is liberal. Liberals think the press is conservative in the sense of protecting its place in the political establishment. Karl Rove once said that the press is “less liberal than it is oppositional.” (A fascinating remark coming from Rove, since it apppears to put him at odds with the conservative base.)

Whereas I believe that the real—and undeclared—ideology of American journalism is savviness, and this is what made the press so vulnerable to the likes of Karl Rove.

Savviness! Deep down, that’s what reporters want to believe in and actually do believe in— their own savviness and the savviness of certain others (including operators like Karl Rove.) In politics, they believe, it’s better to be savvy than it is to be honest or correct on the facts. It’s better to be savvy than it is to be just, good, fair, decent, strictly lawful, civilized, sincere or humane.

Savviness is what journalists admire in others. Savvy is what they themselves dearly wish to be. (And to be unsavvy is far worse than being wrong.) Savviness—that quality of being shrewd, practical, well-informed, perceptive, ironic, “with it,” and unsentimental in all things political—is, in a sense, their professional religion. They make a cult of it. And it was this cult that Karl Rove understood and exploited for political gain.

What is the truest mark of savviness? Winning, of course! Everyone knows that the press admires an unprincipled winner. (Of a piece with its fixation on the horse race.) Josh Green, a reporter for the Atlantic Monthly who actually took the time to understand Rove’s career, totaled up his winnings in a 2004 article (“Karl Rove in a Corner”) that I highly recommend.

“As far as I can determine, in races he has run for statewide or national office or Congress, starting in 1986, Rove’s career record is a truly impressive 34—7.” This record, he notes, “would be impressive even if he used no extreme tactics. But he does use them.” Again and again, Green observes. Rove tries to destroy people with whispering campaigns. He makes stuff up. He transgresses and figures no one will stop him. He goes further than others in the game. These are things you would think journalists would recoil at, or at least observe with regularity.

But Karl Rove: political extremist is not what I read in the press yesterday as word of his resignation got around. Green in ‘04:

Having studied what happens when Karl Rove is cornered, I came away with two overriding impressions. One was a new appreciation for his mastery of campaigning. The other was astonishment at the degree to which, despite all that’s been written about him, Rove’s fiercest tendencies have been elided in national media coverage.”

Elided: to omit, leave out, or strike from consideration. Green is saying that they overlooked how vicious he has been. My explanation: they admired how savvy he has been.

Have you noticed, in all the press coverage of Rove’s announcement yesterday, how no one spoke of knowing Karl Rove as a source? Matt Cooper is one we know about because of the trial of Scooter Libby. (“Spoke to Rove on double super secret background for about two mins before he went on vacation …”) There are many others we do not know about because they agreed to keep his name a secret. But make no mistake: they are also the ones writing the “balanced” non-committal retrospectives, the ones with 50-50 headlines like “Rove bows out despised and deified.” (Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen in the Politico.)

Green’s colleague at the Atlantic, Mark Ambinder, marveled at it: “Boy, did Karl Rove get in his gut the biases, predilections, worldviews, habits, ticks and insecurities of the national media.” I agree with this. And with Ambinder’s observation that part of Rove’s “realignment theory” was to “delegitimize, decertify and discombobulate the press; control it with psychological power; reduce its influence on the political process,” while simultaneously seducing reporters with his credentials as a winner and his savvy take on American politics. (See my posts on press rollback and decertification, policies for which Rove was “the architect.”)

Green was all over the talk shows yesterday because of his recent article in the Atlantic on what went wrong with The Rove Presidency. (Subscribers only) But it’s his study from three years ago that tells the tale about Rove and the press. He noted that close readings of Rove’s methods are relatively few. “Yet as I interviewed people who knew Rove, they brought up examples of unscrupulous tactics—some of them breathtaking—as a matter of course.” Rove had the “he said, she said” press figured out, according to Green:

He seems to understand—indeed, to count on—the media’s unwillingness or inability, whether from squeamishness, laziness, or professional caution, ever to give a full estimate of him or his work. It is ultimately not just Rove’s skill but his character that allows him to perform on an entirely different plane. Along with remarkable strategic skills, he has both an understanding of the media’s unstated self-limitations and a willingness to fight in territory where conscience forbids most others.

That’s the real Karl Rove. But you wouldn’t know it from the “despised and deified” coverage we saw yesterday.

We're number 42!!!!

2007-08-13T22:26:00.001-07:00

McDonald's and Exxon-Mobil exist for exactly the same purpose. Yes, one of them sells billions of hamburgers, while the other pumps billions of barrels of oil, but grease is not the common interest they share. It's money.

McDonald's Corporation exists to make money, not McRibs. If the corporation thinks it can make more money by making high quality burgers at a high price, it will do that. If it can make more money by making low quality burgers at a low price, it will do that. And if they can get away with making low quality burgers at a high price, they will do that -- with great joy.

Not matter what corporate motto is stamped on the side of products or what words hang on the boardroom wall, corporations are simply money machines. That's true of McDonald's or Exxon-Mobil. It's also true of Aetna, and HealthSouth, and Cigna, and Kaiser, and the other private health insurers. They exist to make money. If they can make money by providing health services, they will do so. If they can make more money by denying services, then they will do that. They will provide exactly as much care as maximizes their profits.

And not a penny more.

That's how we came by what politicians are so often prone to proclaim is the best health care system in the world.

For decades, the United States has been slipping in international rankings of life expectancy, as other countries improve health care, nutrition and lifestyles.

Countries that surpass the U.S. include Japan and most of Europe, as well as Jordan, Guam and the Cayman Islands.

For the last twelve years, Republicans have bemoaned every "intrusion" of government services into the realm of private health insurance, and every "advance" has centered on ensuring that services were provided by the same private insurers. That's why we're doing so well.

"Something's wrong here when one of the richest countries in the world, the one that spends the most on health care, is not able to keep up with other countries," said Dr. Christopher Murray, head of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington.

A baby born in the United States in 2004 will live an average of 77.9 years. That life expectancy ranks 42nd, down from 11th two decades earlier, according to international numbers provided by the Census Bureau and domestic numbers from the National Center for Health Statistics.

This plummet from 11th to 42nd hasn't been a complete failure, of course. Private health insurers are still raking in 31% overhead, compared to the 2% overhead in Medicare, and making record profits. And there's hardly a plan being put forward by any candidate at any level that's still not intended to provide health insurance. No one talks of providing health care, thanks goodness, just health insurance, through these same private insurers that have done so well getting us to this point. So buck up, there are winners in this game. Besides, there are 192 members of the U.N. and 194 nations by most counts. 42 is not really so bad, is it?

Capitalism is indeed the most successful economic model yet developed, and the avarice that lies at its core among the most powerful motivators known. But the system is designed to make private money, not public good. When it comes to health care, capitalism is working just as designed.

Hillary's the one

2007-07-28T20:56:00.001-07:00

I waited until late August 2003 before I endorsed a Democratic candidate for president, as I was holding out to see if Al Gore was going to enter the race. When I reached a point where it was clear to me that Gore would not be running, I focused my consideration on the candidates in the race at that time. I watched with respect the efforts and accomplishments of the Dean campaign, how they were running against the party and the media, and bringing new and energized supporters into the process, and then considered that against who in the field at that time was the most able to actually win the nomination, deal with the media effectively and fight them to a draw, and fight the Rove machine and win the election.

But I also went a step further in my analysis and envisioned which of the candidates in January 2005 could step into the post-9/11 toxic dump George W. Bush had created and begin to undo the damage. Back in August 2003, I made the unpopular choice of John Kerry over Howard Dean, and continued to offer praise, suggestions, and criticism when his campaign screwed up, and there were plenty of opportunities for me to criticize as the campaign went forward. But I thought he was the best candidate to survive the nomination process, the best candidate to deal with the corporate media’s attacks, the best candidate to counterpunch against the Rove machine, and the best candidate to step into the job and hit the ground running in January 2005.

Now in late July 2007, after concluding that Al Gore is not going to enter the race, I used the same criteria to determine whom I will be supporting in 2008. I’ve thought about which of the Top Three candidates can:

·Most capably deal with the biases of the corporate media;
·Most capably fight the right wing smear machine;
·Ruthlessly battle the GOP’s likely 2008 campaign tactics;
·Obtain the nomination and,
·Most importantly, step into the job in January 2009.

After looking at these factors and knowing that the problems any Democrat will face in January 2009 are even more challenging than those faced in January 2005, I will be supporting Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination in 2008.

As evidenced by her demeanor on the campaign trail, and the debate performances, she is an extremely capable campaigner and debater, possessing a command of the facts and a sober, realistic assessment of the world as it is now. It is not a world many of us like, and she and other Democrats have made some of the decisions that have led us to where we are now, thereby legitimately making her judgment an issue. These concerns to me are valid, even more so than other concerns about Mark Penn, and the meritocracy argument of the Bush/Clinton/Bush/Clinton progression, which was more relevant in 2000 than it is now given the wholly derelict Bush 43 presidency.

When I move beyond the not-to-be-discounted feelings and emotion against Hillary amongst the base and netroots community stemming largely from her 2002 vote on the use of force authorization and her unwillingness to apologize for it, I find myself back where I was at a similar point in 2003: Among the Top Three, Hillary is 1) electable; 2) the most capable in national security and foreign policy; 3) the most able to address the GOP negligence and abdication of responsibility here at home; and 4) the most able to do the job from the first day in office in January 2009. And she is surrounded with an A-List campaign team that has already demonstrated they will avoid some of the same problems that afflicted the Kerry effort in 2004. She and her team have already demonstrated that they will take no prisoners in dealing with the GOP, will hold the media accountable, and have the requisite toughness and yes, ruthlessness for what is ahead. After 2004, this is critical for me.

This leaves me with the 2002 authorization resolution and her judgment in voting for it. I could write paragraphs, and have, about how I feel about this war and how much I want us to get our Guard and reserve home, and forces redeployed to fighting a real war against terrorists. No matter how I feel about the war and her vote in 2002, I am not willing to disqualify her because of that, and overlook her capabilities and readiness to do the job relative to her Top Tier competitors. To me, Hillary Clinton is the best Democratic candidate for president and is clearly light years ahead of the cast of sitcom characters running for the GOP.

may you be forever young...

2007-07-27T16:00:00.000-07:00

Republican Support Collapses Among Youth

A new Democracy Corps/Greenberg Quinlan Rosner survey finds young people "profoundly alienated from the Republican party and its perceived values."

Key finding: "Young people react with hostility to the Republicans on almost every measure and Republicans and younger voters disagree on almost every major issue of the day."

In the presidential race, "both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama lead Rudy Giuliani -- the most acceptable of the Republican offerings among youth -- by significant margins. The President’s standing is substantially worse, to the degree that is possible, than we find in the broader electorate. Moreover, the disconnect we see between the Republicans and our nation’s youth runs so deep, that it likely will not only outlive the Bush administration, but potentially haunt the Republicans for many years to come."

The Whitehouse Coup

2007-07-25T08:39:00.000-07:00

George W. Bush may not be much of a student. He's certainly not much of a "President" or even a leader, whether in politics or business.

He is, however, one of a long line of Bush war profiteers -- a direct descendant in a family that has a history of war, treason, sedition and unpatriotic behavior.

The BBC just had a very interesting program about The Whitehouse Coup -- the original one, circa 1933; I strongly suggest folks go listen to it and replay it often, everywhere.

What he and others in the current BushCheney Administration have done with their stonewalling, illegal wiretapping, secret prisons, US Attorney firings, Department of Justice politicalization, betrayal of a CIA agent and rampant cronyism is nothing short of miraculous: they have succeeded where Prescott S. Bush failed. They have staged a successful, bloodless coup. Now, let's see how long they can hold it.

First things first: go bookmark the page for the BBC program, and listen to it. Keep a copy for posterity if you can. Here's a blurb talking about it:

Document uncovers details of a planned coup in the USA in 1933 by right-wing American businessmen.
[...snip...]
The coup was aimed at toppling President Franklin D Roosevelt with the help of half-a-million war veterans. The plotters, who were alleged to involve some of the most famous families in America, (owners of Heinz, Birds Eye, Goodtea, Maxwell Hse & George Bush’s Grandfather, Prescott) believed that their country should adopt the policies of Hitler and Mussolini to beat the great depression.
Mike Thomson investigates why so little is known about this biggest ever peacetime threat to American democracy.

It's not a show to miss.

Prescott Bush (Wikipedia entry) was very successful at war profiteering. In fact, it -- and the political machinations that went along with it -- became a mainstay of the "family business." If it wasn't for the forthright involvement of Marine General Smedley Butler (Wiki), Prescott and his friends may very have succeeded in their Business Plot (Wiki) and overthrown President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

One crucial, critical, extraordinary relevant point to take away from all this: when Congress started to investigate, the witness lied under oath. When the investigation began getting close to the top, the investigation was stymied by the expiration and non-renewal of the committee. From the Wikipedia entry:

The Congressional committee report confirmed Butler's testimony:

In the last few weeks of the committee's official life it received evidence showing that certain persons had made an attempt to establish a fascist government in this country.
No evidence was presented and this committee had none to show a connection between this effort and any fascist activity of any European country.
There is no question that these attempts were discussed, were planned, and might have been placed in execution when and if the financial backers deemed it expedient.
This committee received evidence from Maj. Gen Smedley D. Butler (retired), twice decorated by the Congress of the United States. He testified before the committee as to conversations with one Gerald C. MacGuire in which the latter is alleged to have suggested the formation of a fascist army under the leadership of General Butler.[20]
MacGuire denied these allegations under oath, but your committee was able to verify all the pertinent statements made by General Butler, with the exception of the direct statement suggesting the creation of the organization. This, however, was corroborated in the correspondence of MacGuire with his principal, Robert Sterling Clark, of New York City, while MacGuire was abroad studying the various forms of veterans organizations of Fascist character.[21]

Even though the Senate committee did take the threat seriously and did verify that a fascist coup was indeed well past the planning stage, the Senate committee expired.

It was an effective method of defusing a major blow to powerful enemies of the state. One which has continued, IMO, through the use of the Pardon power and Commutation power of the Presidency. For what, if not through the embodiment of the Chief Executive, is better when it comes to staging a coup against Democracy than to start at the top...just the way George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Alberto Gonzales and their supporters have done?

Please listen to and share the BBC program. Remember all the incidents and "accidents" that have occurred during the tenure of the Bush family -- Iran-Contra, BCCI, etc. under Bush I, and an ever-deepening pile under Bush II (Downing Street, PlameGate, USAGate, etc., etc.).

If ever a family so embodied "the sins of the father" being visited sevenfold upon their sons and their sons' sons, this is it. It's time for Congress to impeach, convict and remove all elements of this dangerous infection, preventing them from ever holding office again.

Hey dude where do sign up?

2007-07-20T00:42:00.000-07:00

One of the weirdest tics of mainstream columnists is to disparage liberal Democrats while simultaneously endorsing policies that every liberal Democrat I know would sell their grandmother into white slavery to achieve.

Dan Drezner and Brad DeLong point us today to Clive Crook writing in the Financial Times. Crook spends his whole column telling us that he's dismayed over the recent outbreak of populism among Democrats and suggests instead the following policy agenda:

There is an excellent centrist case to be made for tax reform, to lift the burden of income and payroll taxes from the low-paid and to increase the burden on the better-off. Universal healthcare is long overdue, a shameful state of affairs in so rich a country. Americans pay more than they should for their medicines. More generous and more imaginative assistance for Americans who lose their jobs because of trade — or because of changing tastes and technology — is needed.

It's the damnedest thing. For years Democrats have been complaining that free trade agreements hurt the middle class and should therefore be paired up with policies that help take some of the sting out of increased globalization. Needless to say, we never get any of these policies, so over time our distrust of trade agreements has grown. But believe me: if Crook's "centrist" agenda were on offer as the quid pro quo for supporting trade agreements, we'd snap it up in a heartbeat.

Surely Crook knows this? If, in return for supporting the Doha round and other free trade agreements, we got (a) a more progressive tax system, (b) universal healthcare, (c) the ability to bargain for lower pharmaceutical prices, and (d) serious assistance to workers displaced by all those trade agreements — well, do you think there's a liberal Democrat in the country who wouldn't jump at the deal? If that's what Crook wants, Democrats aren't his problem. His problem is with Republicans, who would rather have their big toes cut off than allow so much as a conversation about universal healthcare and higher taxes on the well-off. Why not write a column about that instead?

2007-07-17T15:31:00.001-07:00

The "Decider" Defends His Delusions

2007-07-12T17:42:00.000-07:00

As we debate what to do in Iraq, here are two facts to bear in mind:

First, a poll this spring of Iraqis — who know their country much better than we do — shows that only 21 percent think that the U.S. troop presence improves security in Iraq, while 69 percent think it is making security worse.

Second, the average cost of posting a single U.S. soldier in Iraq has risen to $390,000 per year, according to a new study by the Congressional Research Service. This fiscal year alone, Iraq will cost us $135 billion, which amounts to a bit more than a quarter-million dollars per minute.

We simply can’t want to be in Iraq more than the Iraqis want us to be there. That poll of Iraqis, conducted by the BBC and other news organizations, found that only 22 percent of Iraqis support the presence of coalition troops in Iraq, down from 32 percent in 2005.

If Iraqis were pleading with us to stay and quell the violence, maybe we would have a moral responsibility to stay. But when Iraqis are begging us to leave, and saying that we are making things worse, then it’s remarkably presumptuous to overrule their wishes and stay indefinitely because, as President Bush termed it in his speech on Tuesday, “it is necessary work.”

We can’t afford universal health care at home — but we can afford more than $10 billion a month so that American troops can be maimed in a country where they aren’t wanted? If we take the total eventual cost of the Iraq war, that sum could be used to finance health care for all uninsured Americans for perhaps 30 years.

Or imagine if we invested just two weeks’ worth of the Iraq spending to fight malaria, de-worm children around the globe and reduce maternal mortality. Those humanitarian projects would save vast numbers of lives and help restore America’s standing in the world.

On Tuesday, Mr. Bush argued that we should give the surge a chance and that the costs of withdrawal would be enormous.

Just because President Bush says something doesn’t mean it is fatuous. It’s true, for example, that our withdrawal may lead to worse horrors in Iraq. But don’t ignore the alternative possibility, believed overwhelmingly by Iraqis themselves, that our departure will make things better.

Mr. Bush is also right that the surge is only just in place and may still enjoy modest success. Sectarian violence initially dropped in Baghdad (although it seems to have risen again since May), and it’s impressive to see Sunni tribes cooperating with us in Anbar against foreign jihadis. Then again, even the Green Zone is now a daily target, Turkish troops may invade Kurdistan and brace yourself for battles in Kirkuk between Kurds and Arabs.

Meanwhile, since Mr. Bush announced the surge, 600 American troops have been killed and 3,000 injured.

But whatever happens on the streets that the Americans patrol, the only solution in Iraq is political, not military. The surge was supposed to build political space for that solution, and that is not happening.

Progress has stalled on de-Baathification and constitutional reform, one-third of Iraq’s cabinet is boycotting the government and people are turning to sectarian militias for protection. The Pentagon itself reported last month that 52 percent of Baghdad residents say that militias are serving the interest of the Iraqi people.

In this desperate situation, the last best hope to break the stalemates in Iraqi politics will come if Congress forces Iraqi politicians to peer over the abyss at the prospect of their country on its own. If Congress makes it clear that the U.S. is heading for the exits — and that we want no permanent bases in Iraq — that may undercut the extremists and lead more Iraqis to focus on preserving their nation rather than expelling the infidels.

It’s nice that Mr. Bush is still confident about Iraq, telling us on Tuesday: “I strongly believe that we will prevail.”

Apparently, we’re doing almost as well today as we were in October 2003 when he blamed journalists for filtering out the good news and declared: “We’re making really good progress.”

Then in September 2004, Mr. Bush assured us that Iraq was “making steady progress.” In April 2005: “We’re making good progress in Iraq.” In October 2005: “Iraq has made incredible political progress.” In November 2005: “Iraqis are making inspiring progress.”

Do we really want to continue making this kind of inspiring progress for the next 10 years?

God Save Us

2007-07-10T00:56:00.000-07:00

This is how Bill Kristol describes the view of those who have followed this war closely for four years of drift, mishap and recklessness and concluded that some kind of withdrawal or redeployment is now our least worst option. It is based on Kristol's judgment that, for reasons unspecified,

"the offensive is working better than expected."

Than who expected? The day after the most fatal bomb yet in Iraq? As the maximal troop surge in Baquba still saw up to 80 percent of the insurgents flee to fight another day? Kristol's objective analysts, of course, the ones who see the true picture ... are the very people - nepotistic neocons - who designed the offensive (and its p.r.) in the first place. Kristol's assessment of Iraq now is as rigged as the WMD evidence many of us foolishly took on faith. Three words: fool me once. Kristol, of course, favors political counter-attack in Washington. We know what that will mean: an attempt to blame those who have had no influence on this war for its baleful consequences and to exonerate the egotists and liars who have perpetuated it.

Kristol's real rationale, of course, has less to do with Iraq and much more to do with the collapsing coalition has been trying to hold together for quite a while:

Why on earth pull the plug now? Why give in to an insane, irrational panic that will destroy the Bush administration and most likely sweep the Republican party to ruin?

Ah, yes, the Republican party. The real prize, the real issue. It's worth reiterating: The main reason to withdraw and redeploy now is because no sane observer believes that continuing to ineffectively occupy a Muslim country against the will of the Iraqi and American people is in the national interest. The surge will end next March, regardless. Whatever slivers of success it has achieved cannot work against the overwhelming fact of Iraq's sectarian disintegration. The "country" cannot be put together again under unending U.S. occupation. And sending more young Americans to die for a sectarian war that is actually increasing the risk to the U.S. and the West as a whole is immoral and strategically foolhardy.

But it could give the neocons a new leash on life, a way to invigorate their exhausted ideological engines. That, now, is what young Americans are dying for. Increasingly, it's all they're dying for. Enough.

2007-07-10T00:55:00.001-07:00

It's the way our system works...

2007-05-28T21:47:00.000-07:00

Andrew Bacevich is a thoughtful conservative critic of the war in Iraq and the foreign policy that led to it. As most know he recently lost his son in Iraq. In his latest article he points out that as his son was doing his duty as a soldier that he was doing his duty as a citizen in opposing the war. Rather than summarize too much, I'll let Prof. Bacevich speak for himself. Read the remaining text here.

Not for a second did I expect my own efforts to make a difference. But I did nurse the hope that my voice might combine with those of others -- teachers, writers, activists and ordinary folks -- to educate the public about the folly of the course on which the nation has embarked. I hoped that those efforts might produce a political climate conducive to change. I genuinely believed that if the people spoke, our leaders in Washington would listen and respond.
This, I can now see, was an illusion.

The people have spoken, and nothing of substance has changed. The November 2006 midterm elections signified an unambiguous repudiation of the policies that landed us in our present predicament. But half a year later, the war continues, with no end in sight. Indeed, by sending more troops to Iraq (and by extending the tours of those, like my son, who were already there), Bush has signaled his complete disregard for what was once quaintly referred to as "the will of the people."
.....
To whom do Kennedy, Kerry and Lynch listen? We know the answer: to the same people who have the ear of George W. Bush and Karl Rove -- namely, wealthy individuals and institutions.

Money buys access and influence. Money greases the process that will yield us a new president in 2008. When it comes to Iraq, money ensures that the concerns of big business, big oil, bellicose evangelicals and Middle East allies gain a hearing. By comparison, the lives of U.S. soldiers figure as an afterthought.

..........

Money maintains the Republican/Democratic duopoly of trivialized politics. It confines the debate over U.S. policy to well-hewn channels. It preserves intact the cliches of 1933-45 about isolationism, appeasement and the nation's call to "global leadership." It inhibits any serious accounting of exactly how much our misadventure in Iraq is costing. It ignores completely the question of who actually pays. It negates democracy, rendering free speech little more than a means of recording dissent.
This is not some great conspiracy. It's the way our system works.

How bad is that "Bush fellow" for the GOP?

2007-05-11T10:59:00.000-07:00

How bad is George Bush for the Republican Party?

Bruce is the grandfather of one of our best friends. Bruce is 93 years old. He has numerous health problems. He has all kinds of problems with mobility, has not been able to drive for a long time, and spends most of his time sitting in his house and reading. While his physical health is what you would expect in a 93 year-old man, he probably has the best memory of anyone I know. The day before our friend’s wedding, Bruce and I sat and talked about World War II, politics and travel for hours.

Bruce has one of the kindest and gentlest personalities imaginable (think Mr. Rogers). He is very religious, and he has been an active member of the Methodist Church his whole life. He served America in World War II. He has a Midwestern, small-town charm and always offers his Midwestern hospitality. Bruce is an incredibly intelligent and wise man. He speaks several languages, and he is a retired professor from a Big Ten University.

However, Bruce is not a "liberal, college professor." Bruce has been a Republican his entire life—all 93 years! Considering that Bruce was a Republican BEFORE, DURING AND AFTER the Great Depression should tell you all you need to know about his political beliefs.

Bruce’s granddaughter visited him this week. As they sat in his living room (as they always do) and talked about her life, her job, his health, etc., the conversation merged into politics (which is rare, due to the fact that Bruce and his granddaughter know they hold opposing political viewpoints). Bruce’s granddaughter then popped the big question.

"Poppy, do you know who you are going to vote for?"

"Yes. Barack Obama."

"But Poppy, he’s a Democrat, and you’re a Republican."

(Coyly) "Not anymore."

Not only did Bruce decide to vote for a Democrat in 2008—He actually made arrangements for someone to help him get out of his house and travel down to the county clerk’s office so that he could change his voter registration to Democrat. Bruce refused to allow anyone to see his name affiliated with Republicans any longer.

Upon further discussion, as Bruce tells his granddaughter all the reasons why he can no longer be a Republican, our friend realizes that Bruce is no longer referring to George W. Bush as "The President" or "President Bush." Bruce merely refers to him as "that Bush fellow."

Amazing.

The Great Depression could not change Bruce from a Republican to a Democrat.

World War II could not change Bruce from a Republican to a Democrat.

FDR could not change Bruce from a Republican to a Democrat.

Harry Truman could not change Bruce from a Republican to a Democrat.

JFK could not change Bruce from a Republican to a Democrat.

The Vietnam War could not change Bruce from a Republican to a Democrat.

Watergate could not change Bruce from a Republican to a Democrat.

George W. Bush? He COULD change Bruce from a Republican to a Democrat, AND HE DID CHANGE BRUCE FROM A REPUBLICAN TO A DEMOCRAT!

THAT is how bad Bush has been for the Republican Party.

If only Bush could have limited his harm solely to the Republican Party. Unfortunately, Bush has also been THAT bad for America.

"Commander Guy"

2007-05-02T22:05:00.000-07:00

Just when the press had pretty much exhausted every joking play on President Bush's self-proclaimed nickname "The Decider" he handed them another on a platter today: "The Commander Guy."

In a speech to the Associated General Contractors of America, a construction industry trade group, today in Washington, he discussed his current tussle with Congress over troop levels and funding for Iraq.
“The question is, ‘Who ought to make that decision, the Congress or the commanders?,’’ Bush said. “As you know, my position is clear – I’m the commander guy.” So he vetoed the congressional initiative in this area.

This led Sheryl Gay Stolberg on The New York Times' blog, The Caucus, to wonder if this suggested a possible new new nickname: "Veto Man."

But what about my hips?

2007-04-18T15:56:00.000-07:00

HEALTHCARE IN CANUCKISTAN....Despite the seemingly endless stream of scare stories peddled by the insurance industry and its conservative enablers about the nearly third-world condition of Canadian healthcare (hip replacements!) it turns out that a review of all the known studies comparing Canadian and American health outcomes gives Canucks the nod. Ezra Klein has the details:

Of the 38 studies examined, 14 showed clear advantaged for Canadian patients, five suggested US care was superior, and the remainder were mixed....How can we possibly countenance a system that costs twice as much as the Canadian system but delivers slightly worse care? Even assuming diminishing returns, our expenditures should result in care outcomes at least 20% or 30% better than Canada's. Instead, they're about 5% worse, but cost around 187%. Does it sound like we're getting a good deal?

Maybe not, but did you know that Canada has waiting lines for some hip replacements?!? Seriously. They do. Clearly this means that national healthcare would be a disaster. As for the rest of the elephant behind the curtain, please ignore it.

truthiness

2007-04-09T23:59:00.001-07:00

If Bush’s surge isn’t breaking the military, then why is the Pentagon:

-extending the tours of duty for 15,000 soldiers just to find warm bodies to maintain it?

-sending mentally wounded troops back to the war?

-calling back another 13,000 National Guard for a yearlong tour at the end of this year?

And why are the Iraqi police and security forces still unwilling to work with us to take on the Mahdi Army, a militia that John McCain says is retreating?

McCain's estranged relationship with the real world

2007-03-28T00:07:00.000-07:00

During an interview on "The Situation Room" this afternoon, John McCain told Wolf Blitzer that he needs to "get up to speed" and stop reporting three-month-old news from Iraq. According to McCain, the surge is working! and the streets of Baghdad are safe for Americans to go strolling down. The only problem? Michael Ware, who is, ya know, a CNN reporter stationed in Baghdad, says McCain hasn't a clue…

Flinching a little, Ware opened his report by saying the reason he was having trouble hearing Wolf's question was because of the helicopters overhead and the sounds of a street gun battle nearby. He emphatically denied knowing of anywhere in Baghdad where anyone could walk in safety. Michael Ware then continued -

"Honestly, Wolf, you'll barely last twenty minutes out there. I dont know what part of Neverland Senator McCain is talking about when he says we can go strolling in Baghdad."
" Honestly...Senator McCain's statement that there are places in Baghdad where it is safe to walk is beyond ludicrous."

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Iraq, Iran, and the Lobby

2007-03-19T23:25:00.000-07:00

It wasn't supposed to be like this: we weren't supposed to be "celebrating" the fourth anniversary of the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq. It was going to be a "cakewalk," the Iraqis would rise up and shower us with rose petals, and Johnny would come marching home in no time. Remember? Besides that, the whole deal would be cost-free, you see, because the revived Iraqi oil industry, no longer under sanctions, would pay the costs of the war. Or so Paul Wolfowitz assured us.

Well, we know all too well what happened instead, yet one can't help wondering: how it is that the very people who got us into this war in the first place are still in a position to get us into another – and are rapidly proceeding to do so?

In most democratic countries, a government that had birthed such a disaster as the Iraq war would have fallen long ago, but this one endures, and, in any case, its probable successor is not going to have a very different approach to foreign policy. This was brought home by the recent action of the Democratic congressional leadership in stripping the military appropriations bill of a provision that would have required the president to seek congressional approval before attacking Iran. Speaker Pelosi had just been booed at the AIPAC conference for criticizing the Iraq war when she rushed back to her office and struck the Iran provision from the bill – just as the powerful pro-Israel lobbying group had been insisting, albeit not too loudly.

After all, the AIPAC conference was supposed to be toning down the ongoing campaign to get us into a shooting war with Iran, but, as the Jerusalem Postpointed out, "the effort was laid to waste once Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert addressed the audience at the gala dinner Monday night." There is supposedly a taboo against Israeli government officials intruding too aggressively in their efforts to influence American politics, although that never stopped Ariel Sharon from openly calling for the U.S. to invade Iraq – as a prelude to taking on Syria and Iran. Olmert went beyond anything Sharon ever attempted, however, in his AIPAC speech:

"I know that… all of you who are concerned about the security and the future of the State of Israel understand the importance of strong American leadership addressing the Iranian threat, and I am sure you will not hamper or restrain that strong leadership unnecessarily."

As we have seen, he was right to be "sure" – Nancy must have skedaddled right back to her office pretty darn fast to excise the offending passage from her bill. But Olmert didn't stop there:

"Those who are concerned for Israel's security, for the security of the Gulf States, and for the stability of the entire Middle East should recognize the need for American success in Iraq and responsible exit. Any outcome that will not help America's strength and would, in the eyes of the people in the region, undercut America's ability to deal effectively with the threat posed by the Iranian regime will be very negative."

With the Democrats in control of Congress – and, in my view at least, more than likely to regain the White House – the Israelis are rightly concerned that their future is not so bright. Israel is finally getting its fair share of criticism of late, and a new boldness in Democratic Party circles – as well as among Republican "realists" – in calling the "special relationship" into question does not augur well for Tel Aviv. This kind of open intervention in U.S. politics by the Israeli leadership can be read as an act of desperation. Faced with what they believe is an "existential" threat from Iran, the Israelis apparently believe they can no longer afford the luxury of subtlety.

Not that there has ever been anything too subtle about AIPAC's hold over Congress. As John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt put it in their study of the Israel lobby's decisive influence on American foreign policy:

"A key pillar of the Lobby's effectiveness is its influence in Congress, where Israel is virtually immune from criticism. This in itself is remarkable, because Congress rarely shies away from contentious issues. Where Israel is concerned, however, potential critics fall silent. One reason is that some key members are Christian Zionists like Dick Armey, who said in September 2002: 'My No. 1 priority in foreign policy is to protect Israel.' One might think that the No. 1 priority for any congressman would be to protect America."

A frightening example of the Christian Zionist-AIPAC alliance in action was this speech at the AIPAC conference by John Hagee, a born-again evangelical and head of Christians for Israel, wherein biblical prophecy is cited – amid images of Armageddon – to justify unconditional support to the Jewish state. (I'll bet this is one manifestation of "Christianism" that Andrew Sullivan will never notice.)

Congress, as Pat Buchanan trenchantly put it way back before Gulf War I, is "Israeli-occupied territory," so it doesn't matter that a war with Iran isn't in American interests. To the politicians who cater to the Israel lobby, there is no daylight between Israeli and American interests; but of course there are significant differences, which have only been exacerbated in the post-9/11 era. We desperately need to stave off the rising influence of extremism in the Muslim world, and yet our government insists on unconditionally taking Tel Aviv's side no matter what the issue or how blatantly unjust Israeli behavior is – due to the unrivaled power of the Israel lobby as a force in American politics. In 1997, legislators were asked to rate lobbies, and they put AIPAC in the number two spot, just below the AARP but ahead of the National Rifle Association and the AFL-CIO. Yes, the Israel lobby has just as much clout in the Democratic Party as the labor unions – if not more – which means that we'll never see a foreign policy that puts America first coming from that side of the aisle.

While the Lobby is quick to accuse its opponents of anti-Semitism, what is striking is the complete disconnect between the politics of AIPAC and the politics of American Jews. Pelosi was booed for her stance on Iraq at the AIPAC conference, but her critique of that misadventure is shared by the overwhelming majority of Jews in this country. And that doesn't seem to matter to most politicians – including Pelosi, who bowed, after all, to Olmert's diktat.

Just as this war, as I've been saying since Day One, was fought to advance Israel's interests, not America's. The next war – yes, I mean the looming conflict with Iran – will be fought for the same reason. American foreign policy has long since ceased pursuing the genuine national interests of this country, and instead is being held hostage by a coalition of neoconservative ideologues and foreign lobbyists, who have no compunctions about leading us into an abyss as long as their no-longer-quite-so-hidden agenda is served.

The big problem for the Lobby is that their power, and willingness to wield it, is no longer a forbidden subject. Increasingly, there is an open discussion of AIPAC's role as the War Party's nerve center and its effective control over the foreign policy agendas of both parties. It is therefore necessary for the Lobby to ratchet up the rhetoric, whip dissidents into line, and keep any potential waverers from breaking ranks. What Olmert said about the alleged mentality of the "people of the region" (the Arabs and Persians) – that any show of "weakness" will only embolden them to resist – applies equally to the Americans. If the Lobby lets a few politicians get away with "Israel-bashing" (i.e., expressing some sympathy for the Palestinians, or questioning why it is that American foreign policy only tilts one way when it comes to the Middle East), then the floodgates will be opened. They can't afford to lose control, or so they seem to think.

It is absolutely astonishing that all of the major Democratic candidates for the White House proclaim their willingness to go to war with Iran if "diplomacy," meaning a relentless barrage of threats, fails to work. Not a single one dares critique our Israel-centered foreign policy. On the question of Iraq, however, Olmert has made a major mistake in intervening, because in doing so he has set himself against almost two-thirds of the American people, who want us out as soon as possible. This puts the politicians, too, in a difficult position: do they obey Olmert's marching orders, or listen to the polls – and their own constituents?

That it is even possible to ask such a question is a dramatic indication that something is very wrong with our political system, and desperately requires fixing. I wonder, however, if there is any single reform that would do any good. This, after all, is democracy in action – operating not in accordance with majority rule, as is commonly assumed, but on the principle of "the squeaky wheel gets the grease." Using the mechanisms of democracy,a small but passionate minority can successfully impose its will on the largely apathetic majority – and it doesn't hurt, as Wesley Clark pointed out, that many of the Democratic Party's major donors have made fealty to Israeli interests a litmus test for candidates.

Speaker Pelosi, who was a Democratic fundraiser long before she was promoted to Congress, knows this all too well, as her actions on the Iran matter dramatically confirm. After all, George W. Bush will veto the appropriations bill if it comes with what he considers extraneous and unacceptable riders, such as restrictions on funding that impede the surge – so why not submit it to the floor with the Iran provision intact just to make a point?

The Democrats backed down, and fast, so our future is all mapped out for us. It took only four years for this administration to get the Middle East escalator going and gin up another war on the heels of the last one. An even greater regional cataclysm – this time, in Iran – seems all but inevitable.

I wish I saw a way out of this, but I don't. Short of firing Congress, as well as impeaching the president and vice president, we will be at war with Iran just as surely as we are now stuck in the Iraqi quicksand – and that war will be brought to you by the same crew that started the previous one. It's like we're caught in a recurring nightmare, in which the same ghouls rise up and taunt us with their banshee screams, singing a chorus of war-cries, drowning out all sense until our eardrums nearly burst. As I put it in a column published in 2004:

"This war has benefited only two actors in the Middle East drama: bin Laden and Ariel Sharon. The extremists are empowered, instead of isolated, and the future is war, war, and more war, as far as the eye can see…."

Events have, unfortunately, only confirmed my prognosis, but there is reason for optimism in the long run, even if short-term pessimism is our lot. The American people don't like foreigners interfering in their politics, and Olmert may have gone too far. Aside from that, the trial of longtime AIPAC honcho Steve Rosen, and the group's Iran expert, Keith Weissman, on charges of giving Israel top-secret information gleaned from former Pentagon official Larry Franklin, is scheduled to finally begin this summer. The Lobby is increasingly buffeted by blowback stemming from its own arrogance, and the day of reckoning approaches. Whether that day comes before or after we go to war with Iran is, largely, a matter of chance…

Can American Jews unplug the Israel lobby?

2007-03-19T21:43:00.000-07:00

As Bush's unbalanced Mideast policies careen from disaster to disaster, people who don't toe the AIPAC line are beginning to speak out.

By Gary Kamiya

Mar. 20, 2007 | Last week, a familiar Washington ritual took place: Leading American politicians from both parties lined up at the annual policy conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee to vie with each other over who could pledge the most undying fealty to Israel. As usual, much of Congress showed up -- half of the members of the U.S. Senate and more than half of the House, including figures like Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, along with Vice President Dick Cheney.

It was a typical AIPAC parallel-universe extravaganza, marred only by partisan rifts that have begun to appear over Iraq. (Even some of the AIPAC crowd, who overwhelmingly supported the war at the outset, have begun to realize that it has been a disaster for both the United States and Israel.) Cheney got a standing ovation, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said via a video link that winning the war in Iraq was important for Israel, Nancy Pelosi was booed for criticizing the war, a fire-breathing Christian dispensationalist who believes that war on Iran will bring about the Rapture and the Second Coming was rapturously greeted, and Barack Obama took heat for having the audacity to mention the suffering of the Palestinians.

But AIPAC showed its true power -- and its continuing ability to steer American Mideast policy in a disastrous direction -- when a group of conservative and pro-Israel Democrats succeeded in removing language from a military appropriations bill that would have required Bush to get congressional approval before using military force against Iran.

The pro-Israel lobby's victory on the Iran bill is almost unbelievable. Even after the nation repudiated the Iraq war decisively in the 2006 midterms, even after it has become clear that the Bush administration's Middle East policy is severely unbalanced toward Israel and has damaged America's standing in the world, Congress still cannot bring itself to stand up to the AIPAC line.

The fact that AIPAC, which is ranked as the second-most powerful lobby in the country (trailing only AARP, but ahead of the NRA) virtually dictates U.S. policy in the Mideast has long been one of those surreal facts of Washington life that politicians discuss only when they get near retirement -- if then. In 2004, Sen. Ernest "Fritz" Hollings had the bad taste to reveal this inconvenient truth when he said, "You can't have an Israel policy other than what AIPAC gives you around here." Michael Massing, who has done exemplary reporting on AIPAC for the New York Review of Books, quoted a congressional staffer as saying, "We can count on well over half the House -- 250 to 300 members -- to do reflexively whatever AIPAC wants." In unguarded moments, even top AIPAC figures have confirmed such claims. The New Yorker's Jeffrey Goldberg quoted Steven Rosen, AIPAC's former foreign-policy director who is now awaiting trial on charges of passing top-secret Pentagon information to Israel, as saying, "You see this napkin? In twenty-four hours, we could have the signatures of seventy senators on this napkin."

Until 9/11 and the Iraq war, this state of affairs was of little concern to anyone except those passionately interested in the Middle East -- a small group that has never included more than a tiny minority of Americans, Jews or non-Jews. If the pro-Israel lobby wielded enormous power over America's Mideast policies, so what? America's Mideast policies were always reliably pro-Israel anyway, for a variety of reasons, including many that had nothing to do with lobbying by American Jews. And the stakes didn't seem that big.

But in the wake of 9/11 and the Iraq war, that all changed dramatically. 9/11, and the Bush administration's response to it, made it inescapably clear that America's Mideast policies affect everyone in the country: They are literally a matter of life and death. The Bush administration's neoconservative Mideast policy is essentially indistinguishable from AIPAC's. And so it is no longer possible to ignore it -- even though it is a notoriously touchy and divisive subject.

The touchiest aspect of all is the role played by pro-Israel neoconservatives in laying the groundwork for the Iraq war. Much of the media has been loath to go near this, for obvious and in some ways honorable reasons: It feels a little like "blame the Jews." But that taboo has faded as it has become clearer that "the Jews" are not the ones being blamed for helping pave the way to war, but a group of powerful neoconservatives, some but not all of them Jewish, who subscribe to the hard-right views of Israel's Likud Party. This group no more represents "the Jews" than the Shining Path represents "the Peruvians."

Logic and forthrightness has traditionally taken a back seat to timorous self-censorship when it comes to discussing these matters. But in addition to the war debate, several other watershed events have helped erode the taboo against discussing the power of the Israel lobby. The most important were the publications of John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt's "The Israel Lobby," and Jimmy Carter's "Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid." The overwrought reaction to Mearsheimer and Walt's piece, ironically, only supported its thesis. Similarly, the opprobrium heaped on Carter only succeeded in making it clear how little room there is for open discussion of these issues in America.

For all these reasons, a powerful spotlight has been turned on the pro-Israel lobby. And there are signs that increasing numbers of Americans, Jews and non-Jews alike, are willing to openly question whether it is in America's national interest for AIPAC, whose positions are well to the right of those held by most American Jews, to wield such disproportionate power over America's Mideast policies.

As a group, American Jews continue to be staunchly liberal. A new poll shows that 77 percent of American Jews now think that the Iraq war was a mistake, compared with 52 percent of all Americans. (Jewish support for the war has collapsed: A poll taken a month before the war showed that 56 percent of Jews supported it, somewhat below the national average at that time.) Eighty-seven percent of Jews voted Democratic in 2006. And although data here is murkier, polls also show that most American Jews hold views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that are to the left of AIPAC's.

What all this adds up to is that for liberal or moderate American Jews who don't support Bush's war in Iraq or his "war on terror" and who are willing to look at Israel warts and all, the fact that AIPAC has anointed itself as the de facto spokesmen for American Jews is becoming more and more unacceptable. And increasing numbers of them are beginning to speak out.

One of the most trenchant commentators is Philip Weiss, a regular contributor to the Nation. Weiss' blog, MondoWeiss, offers informed and passionate discussions of what he calls "delicate and controversial matters surrounding American Jewish identity and Israel." He routinely skewers attempts by mainstream Jewish organizations and pundits to lay down the law on what is acceptable discourse. This means being willing to look at off-limits subjects like "dual loyalty." When the American Jewish Committee, a powerful advocacy group that shares AIPAC'S line, issued a reactionary response to the Mearsheimer-Walt piece and the Carter book, accusing Jewish intellectuals who didn't toe the party line on Israel of being "self-haters," Weiss pointed out that the heavy-handed attempt had backfired -- instead of silencing dissenting voices, the AJC piece revealed for all to see the "anti-intellectual, vicious, omerta practices of the Jewish leadership."

Other widely read writers who have been outspoken on formerly taboo subjects include Matthew Yglesias of the American Prospect and Glenn Greenwald of Salon. Both Greenwald and Yglesias, for example, punctured a classic attempt by the Jewish establishment to smear Gen. Wesley Clark, who, saying that he feared that Bush might be preparing to attack Iran, added, "The Jewish community is divided but there is so much pressure being channeled from the New York money people to the office seekers." Clark was immediately -- and predictably -- accused of being anti-Semitic for referring to "the New York money people" and implying they wanted war with Iran. But as both Yglesias and Greenwald pointed out, everything Clark said was demonstrably true. Adding insult to injury, Greenwald proved it was true by citing such right-wing, pro-Israel media sources as the New York Sun and the New York Post.

Of course, a few blogs, articles and organizations do not necessarily a movement make -- certainly not one capable of standing up to a deep-pocketed powerhouse like AIPAC. But there are other signs that the hegemony of AIPAC and its ilk is weakening. Last year liberal Jewish groups like Americans for Peace Now, Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism and Peace and the Israel Policy Forum succeeded in handing AIPAC a legislative defeat, persuading Congress to gut a harsh AIPAC-supported bill that would have cut off all aid to the Palestinian people. These groups still have only a fraction of AIPAC's clout and money. But as Gregory Levey noted in Salon, there has been talk of a new lobby, possibly bankrolled by billionaire George Soros, which would compete with AIPAC. If such a group comes into existence -- and it's much too soon to say that it will -- the entire playing field would be changed.

How long AIPAC will hold sway depends on how long it can convince politicians that it speaks for American Jews. It doesn't, but only American Jews can prove that. American politicians are not going to stop paying homage to AIPAC until there's an alternative -- and only Jews can provide it. Are liberal Jews really beginning to turn speak out against AIPAC? And if not, why not?

To try to get some answers, I called M.J. Rosenberg, the director of policy analysis for the Israel Policy Forum, a Washington-based liberal counterpart to AIPAC that advocates muscular U.S. support for a two-state solution in Palestine. Rosenberg worked for AIPAC between 1982 and 1986, leaving when he became disenchanted with the group's hard-line response to the Oslo peace process.

I asked Rosenberg how AIPAC has been able to maintain its power.

"Although they [AIPAC] don't represent anything like a majority of American Jews, they may represent a majority of those who are most interested in Israel," Rosenberg said. "American Jews who care about Israel and other things are more likely to be supporters of the IPF kind of approach. I think Jews who care only about Israel are closer to the AIPAC position. In our politics today, single-issue voters and donors tend to have clout out of all proportion to their numbers. That's nothing new. My father used to tell me that in the 1930s when you had any kind of a meeting of liberals, the Communists always prevailed because they were the most single-minded -- everybody else would go home. Things go to extremes. And that would apply to the right-to-life movement and the gun movement as well. We always claim we're the majority -- we are, but we have a soft majority. And they've got a hard minority."

Why weren't more American Jews with moderate views on the Middle East stepping forward to challenge AIPAC and its hawkish policies? I asked Rosenberg. Was it because they were afraid of being morally blackmailed -- facing the predictable accusations of being self-hating Jews, disloyal to Israel, collaborationist "kapos," and so on?

"I think the number of people in that group is relatively small," Rosenberg said. "I think the much larger number are people who are absolutely indifferent. And therefore they're not susceptible to moral blackmail because they will never hear what AIPAC or the IPF or any of the Israel organizations say. I don't know what percentage it is, but my guess is that no more than 40 percent of American Jews think about Israel in any way, shape or form. Most of them live their lives, like most people do. So we're fighting over people who think about it at all, and as I said the single-issue ones tend to be more with AIPAC for now. We're trying to get the rest. But I do think that as time goes on, with more and more young people, that moral blackmail thing doesn't work anymore."

Rosenberg said that long-term demographic trends were working against AIPAC and its fear tactics. The AIPAC leadership, which he described as a "true believer [on Israel] crowd with money," is "a much older crowd," he said. "Their children and grandchildren don't have those views. As we get further from World War II, it's harder to scare young people into support for Israel. They will support Israel if they believe in Israel and if Israel appeals to them. But those scare tactics, 'write checks because there's going to be another Holocaust' -- that's doesn't work with the under-60 crowd. The people who demonstrated against the Vietnam war in the '60s, they're just not going to buy into the 'Hitler is coming' stuff. They're just too smart for that. I've got kids in their 20s -- the idea of telling them that America could be a dangerous place for them? They would laugh in my face. That's ridiculous."

Rosenberg also pointed out that "Israel's popularity with American Jews has gone down since 1977, when Begin became prime minister. The way Israel was sold, the Leon Uris Israel, was the Israel of the kibbutz, this socialist paradise. And that's totally changed now. A lot of the glow is really gone, which makes me sad, because I'm very involved with Israel and I care a lot about Israel."

Rosenberg said that one of the best things American Jews can do to educate themselves about Israel is to read the Israeli press, which routinely prints pieces far more harshly critical of Israel than anything found in the American media. "If people who don't follow the situation closely started to read the Israeli press, started to read Haaretz, they'd realize how much debate there is there, and how many people feel terribly about what's happened to the Palestinians, and how many people are determined to break out of this situation," Rosenberg said. "And they'd realize that Israelis in general feel that the rhetoric of American Jewish organizations is about as outdated as the last century. It says nothing to Israelis. They laugh at that kind of rhetoric. If American Jews saw what the debate is like there, that would make Israel more popular. The more knowledge, the better. American Jews would see that the kind of liberal humanitarian views they have on issues here are perfectly legitimate in Israel, and perfectly common in Israel, even though in the mainstream American Jewish organizations they're considered off-center."

Rosenberg compared American Jews' evolving attitudes to Israel to the achievements of the civil rights movement. "Look, 25 years ago you couldn't even talk about the Palestinians. I mean, Golda Meir said there was no such thing as a Palestinian. Now there's not a single major Jewish organization except the far-right organizations that does not give at least nominal support to the two-state solution. So it's moving. It's kind of like the civil rights movement in this country. It's not perfect, but you see the change. I would say that 90 percent of American Jews understand that there's going to be a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza, with East Jerusalem as its capital. That's what most Israelis know is going to be the future. So that's something."

Liberal American Jews are in a difficult situation, with powerful and understandable emotional crosscurrents pulling them both ways. If they are liberal, antiwar, anti-Bush Democrats, willing to look critically at Israel, you'd think they might be willing to speak out against AIPAC. But why should they? Like most other Americans, most Jews are probably sick of Israel's endless conflict with the Palestinians, don't know much about it, and aren't that interested in learning more. Everyone knows that holding strong opinions about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a surefire ticket to painful arguments -- in this case, possibly within one's own family. Much easier just to let AIPAC be in charge of speaking for Jews on Israel and be done with it.

American Jews may not be as susceptible as they once were to the old fear-and-guilt approach, as Rosenberg suggests, but for many Israel remains something of an untouchable subject. They may not support it 100 percent, maybe not even 50 percent, but they're still not ready to do anything to undercut a group like AIPAC that does. For some, this is simply a reflection of a more or less ardent Zionism. For others, the reasons can be subtler. For Jews who have little attachment to their religion or their cultural traditions, supporting Israel -- which for many, unfortunately, means actively or passively supporting AIPAC's position on Israel -- may be a way of demonstrating that they haven't completely abandoned their heritage. The internalized second-class status of being in the diaspora, too, may play a role: "Who am I in New York City to say anything against a guy in the West Bank facing suicide bombers?" As Haaretz's diplomatic correspondent and my longtime Salon colleague Aluf Benn once told me, "For American Jews, Israel is a cause. We Israelis don't see it that way."

We find ourselves in a very strange situation. America's Mideast policies are in thrall to a powerful Washington lobby that is only able to hold power because it has not been challenged by the people it presumes to speak for. But if enough American Jews were to stand up and say "not in my name," they could have a decisive impact on America's disastrous Mideast policies.

Unplugging the Israeli Lobby

2007-03-19T21:39:00.000-07:00

Democrats are railing at just about everything President Bush does, with one prominent exception: Mr. Bush’s crushing embrace of Israel.

There is no serious political debate among either Democrats or Republicans about our policy toward Israelis and Palestinians. And that silence harms America, Middle East peace prospects and Israel itself.

Within Israel, you hear vitriolic debates in politics and the news media about the use of force and the occupation of Palestinian territories. Yet no major American candidate is willing today to be half as critical of hard-line Israeli government policies as, say, Haaretz, the Israeli newspaper.

Three years ago, Israel’s minister of justice spoke publicly of photos of an elderly Palestinian woman beside the ruins of her home, after it had been destroyed by the Israeli army. He said that they reminded him of his own grandmother, who had been dispossessed by the Nazis. Can you imagine an American cabinet secretary ever saying such a thing?

One reason for the void is that American politicians have learned to muzzle themselves. In the run-up to the 2004 Democratic primaries, Howard Dean said he favored an “even-handed role” for the U.S. — and was blasted for being hostile to Israel. Likewise, Barack Obama has been scolded for daring to say: “Nobody is suffering more than the Palestinian people.” In contrast, Hillary Rodham Clinton has safely refused to show an inch of daylight between herself and Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.

A second reason may be that American politicians just don’t get it. King Abdullah of Jordan spoke to Congress this month and observed: “The wellspring of regional division, the source of resentment and frustration far beyond, is the denial of justice and peace in Palestine.” Though widely criticized, King Abdullah was exactly right: from Morocco to Yemen to Sudan, the Palestinian cause arouses ordinary people in coffee shops more than almost anything else.

You can argue that Arabs pursue a double standard, focusing on repression by Israelis while ignoring greater human rights violations by fellow Arabs. But the suffering in Palestinian territories, while not remotely at the scale of brutality in Sudan or Iraq, is still tragically real.

B’Tselem, a respected Israeli human rights organization, reports that last year Palestinians killed 17 Israeli civilians (including one minor) and six Israeli soldiers. In the same period, B’Tselem said, Israeli forces killed 660 Palestinians, triple the number killed in 2005. Of the Palestinians killed in 2006, half were not taking part in hostilities at the time they were killed, and 141 were minors.

For more than half a century, the U.S. was an honest broker in the Middle East. Presidents Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson and Ronald Reagan were warmer to Israel and Dwight Eisenhower, Jimmy Carter and George H. W. Bush a bit cooler, but all sought a balance. George W. Bush has abandoned that tradition of balance.

Hard-line Israeli policies have profoundly harmed that country’s long-term security by adding vulnerable settlements, radicalizing young Palestinians, empowering Hamas and Hezbollah, isolating Israel in the world and nurturing another generation of terrorists in Lebanon. The Israeli right’s aggressive approach has only hurt Israeli security, just as President Bush’s invasion of Iraq ended up harming U.S. interests.

The best hope for Israel in the long run isn’t a better fence or more weaponry; they can provide a measure of security in the short run but will be of little help if terrorists turn, as they eventually will if the present trajectory continues, to chemical, biological or radiological weapons. Ultimately, security for Israel will emerge only from a peace agreement with Palestinians. We even know what that peace deal will look like: the Geneva accord, reached in 2003 by private Israeli and Palestinian negotiators.

M. J. Rosenberg of the Israel Policy Forum headlined a recent column, “Pandering Not Required.” He wisely called on American presidential candidates instead to prove their support for Israel by pledging: “If I am elected president, I will do everything in my power to bring about negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians with the goal of achieving peace and security for Israel and a secure state for the Palestinians.”

Last summer, after Hezbollah killed three Israeli soldiers and kidnapped two others, Prime Minister Olmert invaded Lebanon and thus transformed Hezbollah into a heroic force in much of the Arab world. President Bush would have been a much better friend to Israel if he had tried to rein in Mr. Olmert. So let’s be better friends — and stop biting our tongues.

You're invited to post your comments about this column on Mr. Kristof's blog, www.nytimes.com/ontheground

How Much More Harm Can Bush Do?

2007-03-06T23:18:00.000-08:00

U.S. casualties (dead and wounded) have now reached 27,000 in a war that was supposed to be a "cakewalk," over in a few weeks. If what four-star Gen. Wesley Clark, former supreme commander of NATO, told Amy Goodman in a March 2 interview is correct, U.S. casualties are yet in their early days.

Gen. Clark told Amy Goodman that shortly after 9/11 he was shown a Pentagon "memo that describes how we're going to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and, finishing off, Iran."

That sounds exactly like the plan that neoconservative Norman Podhoretz set out in Commentary magazine.

The media have done a good job for the government of keeping the blood and gore out of the living room. Except for close friends or relatives of one of the 27,000, Americans have not been impacted by the war. They are even less aware of the consequences for Iraqis.

Every day 100 or more Iraqi civilians are killed and 100 or more are maimed and injured. For example, as of early evening Tuesday, March 6, the U.S. had lost 10 GIs killed. Iraqi casualties for the day totaled 621, with 215 killed and 406 wounded.

U.S. troops routinely kill Iraqi civilians mistakenly or from frustration, but the heavy daily casualties are the result of the civil war made possible by the U.S. overthrow of the Iraqi government. U.S. troops per se are not responsible for much of the daily toll, but the Bush administration, Congress, and the American people are.

The March 6 toll of 621 civilian casualties is high even for Iraq. Assume 200 casualties each day and the result is 73,000 Iraqi casualties per year. Why does anyone in the Bush administration, Congress, or among the public believe that the U.S. has the right to wreck a country and inflict such extraordinary harm on a civilian population?

How did the "war on terror" become a war on the Iraqi people?

We have heard every answer: intelligence mistakes, incompetence, and evil machinations. Whichever answer we take, the killing and destruction continue.

Why?

It has recently come to light that the U.S. government has imposed an oil deal on the puppet Iraqi government that turns Iraqi oil over to U.S. and British firms for exploitation. Bush-Cheney have not brought Iraqis democracy, but they have stolen their oil revenues.

The profits of the military-industrial complex are soaring, and higher military budgets are being appropriated. The value of Cheney's Halliburton stock options has not merely doubled or tripled but multiplied by a factor of 32.

The Israel Lobby sees the war as enhancing Israeli hegemony in the Middle East and making possible the completion of Israel's theft of Palestine from Palestinians.

Thus, the three most powerful lobbies in America are the beneficiaries of the devastation of Iraq. The combined power of these lobbies makes it impossible for Congress to respond to the American people and end the war.

American politicians and administrations still cloak their motives in idealistic principles, but it has been a long time since anyone has seen any principled behavior in Washington.

Despite the unrelenting U.S. propaganda against Iran and North Korea, a poll of 28,000 people in 27 countries for the BBC World Service (March 6) found that Israel, Iran, and the U.S. in that order are regarded as the most negative influences on the world. Even North Korea is regarded as a less negative influence than America.

Japan, Canada, the EU, France, China, and India are all regarded as more positive influences on the world than the United States.

The Bush-Cheney regime has achieved this deplorable result in a mere six years.

Yet the Democrats cannot even pass a toothless resolution against committing more U.S. troops to Iraq.

Far from making Americans safe by attacking a country that posed no threat to the U.S., Bush and Cheney have alarmed the Russians and the Chinese. Russian President Vladimir Putin and Gen. Yury Baluyevsky, chief of the Russian General Staff, have both warned that the Bush regime's military aggression and drive for hegemony are setting off another arms race. Gen. Baluyevsky says that Russia might pull out of the 20-year-old Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty.

China has announced a 17.8 percent increase in its military budget for 2007.

China is America's most important banker. How long will China fund America's wars and trade deficit when it finds itself so threatened by America's "leaders" that it has to accelerate its military spending?

Americans still regard themselves as the salt of the earth. But the rest of the world no longer sees Americans that way. When citizens of other countries turn their eyes toward America, they see evil.

USA Today: "W" Stands For Worst

2007-02-16T20:50:00.000-08:00

In the run-up to the 2006 election, Senator Hillary Clinton said that George W Bush would be seen by history as one of America's worst presidents in history. A year ago, in January of 2006, USA Today's publisher Al Neuharth criticized here in a piece titled Hillary has it wrong, Bush not the 'worst':

Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y. [...] charged that the Bush administration "will go down in history as one of the worst that has ever governed our country." She's wrong.

Neuharth provided his own list of the worst presidents in our history, adding that Bush would not make the list:

Andrew Jackson, (D) 1829-37
James Buchanan, (D) 1857-61
Ulysses S. Grant, (R) 1869-77
Herbert Hoover, (R) 1929-33
Richard Nixon, (R) 1969-74
It's very unlikely Bush can crack that list in his remaining three years in office.

... but now, he is retracting that statement.

cos's diary :: ::

A year ago I criticized Hillary Clinton for saying "this (Bush) administration will go down in history as one of the worst."

"She's wrong," I wrote. Then I rated these five presidents, in this order, as the worst: Andrew Jackson, James Buchanan, Ulysses Grant, Hoover and Richard Nixon. "It's very unlikely Bush can crack that list," I added.

I was wrong. This is my mea culpa. Not only has Bush cracked that list, but he is planted firmly at the top.

In his new op-ed, Neuharth gives us a new list: the phrases to remember Bush's Iraq debacle with.

"Shock and Awe," early 2003.
"Mission Accomplished," May 1, 2003.
"Stay the Course," June 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006.
"New Strategy," 2007.
... and, of course, "The Decider"

Bush admitting his many mistakes on Iraq and ending that fiasco might make many of us forgive, even though we can never forget the terrible toll in lives and dollars.

Presidential Politics and the Israeli Lobby

2007-02-03T14:27:00.001-08:00

On Thursday, the neoconservative New York Sun published a remarkable article reporting on an event to be held that night by AIPAC, at which Hillary Clinton was to deliver the keynote address and John Edwards was to appear at the pre-speech cocktail party. The article made several points which are typically deemed off-limits to opponents of neoconservatism -- ones which almost invariably provoke accusations of anti-semitism when made by others.

First, the Sun noted how important AIPAC's support and financial contributions are to presidential candidates:

"When it comes to important gatherings like this, there is going to be a lot of pressure on the major candidates to not let one of their competitors have the room to themselves," a Democratic strategist [and former Joe Lieberman aide], Daniel Gerstein, said.

Tonight's event is the first time any of the 2008 candidates have competed for attention in the same room since they launched their campaigns in earnest. It is also an important illustration of just how much stock all of the presidential candidates, Democrats and Republicans alike, will put in the pro- Israel community, particularly for campaign dollars.

Then, the Sun emphasized how vital it was for presidential candidates to attract contributions from New York Jewish groups generally, and how such contributions (as is true for all interest groups) are available only to those candidates who support those groups' so-called "pro-Israel" agenda:

A Democratic political consultant who worked on President Clinton 's re-election campaign, Hank Sheinkopf, noted that the Aipac dinner always draws a parade of politicians.

New York is the ATM for American politicians. Large amounts of money come from the Jewish community," he said. "If you're running for president and you want dollars from that group, you need to show that you're interested in the issue that matters most to them."

And, according to the Sun, what do presidential candidates have to do in order to ensure access to "the ATM for American politicians" -- the "large amounts of money from the Jewish community" in New York? What is the "issue that matters most to them"? Belligerence towards Iran:

Indeed, how to deal with Iran is likely to be the next majority foreign policy conundrum the 2008 presidential candidates face.

While Mr. Edwards and Mrs. Clinton have different positions on how to deal with the Iraq war, each has used harsh language on Iran.

The Sun also highlighted how vital (what it calls) "the circuit of influential Jewish donors" is to Hillary Clinton specifically:

Mrs. Clinton, who has opted out of the public campaign financing system, has tapped into the circuit of influential Jewish donors for years and has strong support in the community. A spokesman for Aipac, Joshua Block, said yesterday that the senator and former first lady has "an extremely consistent and strong record of support on issues that are important to the pro- Israel community."

"She is an extraordinary leader on those issues in the United States Senate," he said.

So, according to The New York Sun (and the sources it cites): (1) financial support from groups like AIPAC is indispensable for presidential candidates; (2) the New York Jewish community of "influential" donors is a key part of the "ATM for American politicians"; (3) the issue which they care about most is Iran; and (4) they want a hawkish, hard-line position taken against Iran. And the presidential candidates -- such as Clinton and Edwards -- are embracing AIPAC's anti-Iran position in order to curry favor with that group.

If any public figure made those same points, they would be excoriated, accused of all sorts of heinous crimes, and forced into repentance rituals (ask Wes Clark). But this is what the New York Sun reported on Thursday.

As expected, Sen. Clinton matched Edwards' hard-line anti-Iran rhetoric by including all sorts of hawkish threats in her AIPAC speech:

Calling Iran a danger to the U.S. and one of Israel's greatest threats, U.S. senator and presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton said "no option can be taken off the table" when dealing with that nation. . . . "We need to use every tool at our disposal, including diplomatic and economic in addition to the threat and use of military force," she said.

But according to the equally neoconservative New York Post, Clinton's speech was poorly received by many of the AIPAC members, because she committed the crime of suggesting that diplomacy (presumably as opposed to war) ought to be attempted first in order to resolve these issues with Iran:

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton drew grumbles at a pro-Israel dinner in Times Square last night when she encouraged "engaging" with Iran before taking stronger action to keep it nuke-free. . . .

Clinton's remarks at the Marriott Marquis were met with little applause, and after she left the stage, several people said they were put off by the presidential candidate. "This is the wrong crowd to do that with," said one person at the dinner, noting the pro-Israel crowd wanted to hear tougher rhetoric.

Is there anything that Wes Clark said that is not included in these articles from the Sun and the Post? No, there is not. In fact, what Clark said is but a small subset of what these articles documented.

It is simply true that there are large and extremely influential Jewish donor groups which are agitating for a U.S. war against Iran, and that is the case because those groups are devoted to promoting Israel's interests and they perceive it to be in Israel's interests for the U.S. to militarily confront Iran. That is what the Sun and the Post have made clear.

There is just no point in denying that or pretending it is not the case, and in any event, the way in which these groups have ratcheted up their explicit anti-Iran advocacy has made it impossible for these facts to be concealed any longer (and, as I have noted before, neoconservatives have been increasingly arguing that American Jews of all political stripes are compelled to support the Bush administration because of its supposedly "pro-Israel" policies -- a claim grounded in the very "dual loyalty" theories which they claim to find so offensive and outrageous when advanced by others).

It goes without saying that there are other factions and motives behind the push for war with Iran besides right-wing Jewish groups. There is the generic warmongering, militarism and oil-driven expansionism represented by Dick Cheney. And there are the post-9/11 hysterics and bigots who crave ever-expanding warfare and slaughter of Muslims in the Middle East for reasons having nothing to do with Israel. There are evangelical Christians who crave more Middle Eastern war on religious and theological grounds, and there are some who just believe that the U.S. can and should wage war against whatever countries seem not like to us. And, it should also be noted, a huge portion of American Jews, if not the majority, do not share this agenda.

Nonetheless, the influence of self-proclaimed "pro-Israeli" American Jewish groups in helping to push the country into what looks more and more every day to be an inevitable conflict with Iran is very significant and cannot be ignored. Along those lines, I want to return to the David Brooks column which I wrote about on Thursday -- a column I criticized on the ground that Brooks falsely asserted, in essence, that "Americans" want continued U.S. military domination of the Middle East, and that the disaster of Iraq hasn't changed their views on that topic, even though polling data show precisely the opposite.

Despite all of that, Brooks did make a point which is both true and important -- namely, that among all of the leading presidential candidates, and within the dominant American political discourse, the only view that is really represented is the view that America should continue to militarily dominate the Middle East:

Americans are having a debate about how to proceed in Iraq, but we are not having a strategic debate about retracting American power and influence. What’s most important about this debate is what doesn’t need to be said. No major American leader doubts that America must remain, as Dean Acheson put it, the locomotive of the world.

Look at the leaders emerging amid this crisis. The two major Republican presidential contenders are John McCain and Rudy Giuliani, the most aggressive internationalists in a party that used to have an isolationist wing.

The Democrats, meanwhile, campaigned for Congress in 2006 by promising to increase the size of the military. The presidential front-runner, Hillary Clinton, is the leader of the party’s hawkish wing and recently called for a surge of U.S. troops into Afghanistan. John Edwards, the most “leftward” major presidential contender, just delivered a bare-knuckled speech in which he castigated the Bush administration for not being tough enough with Iran. “To ensure that Iran never gets nuclear weapons, we need to keep all options on the table,” Edwards warned.

Even though Americans do not support military intervention in the Middle East on behalf of Israel, and fewer and fewer support military adventurism in the Middle East generally, Brooks is right about the fact that all of the leading presidential candidates embrace the militaristic Middle East agenda shared by AIPAC and similar groups. Who are the candidates who reject it? Any who would are immediately marginalized and would be subjected to the Wes Clark treatment (i.e., demonized as an anti-semite unless and until they repented, appeared before Abe Foxman to request absolution, repudiated their views, and then took an oath of allegiance to that agenda). And they would be cut off from what Hank Sheinkopf called the "ATM for American politicians."

Thus, no leading presidential candidate seems able to articulate clear opposition to the militaristic, war-seeking posture we are obviously taking with regard to Iran. Instead, they are all spouting rhetoric which -- as Digby pointed out last night -- amounts to an endorsement, or at least a re-inforcement, of the Bush Doctrine: namely, that preemptive war is permissible in general and may be specifically necessarily against Iran. Regardless of whether there is merit in the abstract to the notion of "keeping all options on the table," this sort of talk now has the effect, as Digby argues, of enabling Bush's increasingly war-provoking moves towards Iran.

There is a real, and quite disturbing, discrepancy between the range of permissible views on these issues within our mainstream political discourse and the views of a large segment of the American public. The former almost completely excludes the latter.

That has to change and quickly. In the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq, we did not have a real debate in this country about whether that was wise or just. Cartoon images and bullying tactics supplanted rational discourse -- not only prior to the invasion but for several years after -- and we are paying the very heavy price for that now. That is simply not a luxury that the country can afford this time. It is genuinely difficult to imagine anything more cataclysmic for the United States than a military confrontation with Iran.

If part of our motivation in confronting Iran is that Iran is a threat to Israel, then we should declare that openly and debate whether that is wise. That topic cannot be rendered off-limits by toxic and manipulative anti-semitism accusations. All the time, Americans openly debate the influence which all sorts of interest groups have on government policy. There is nothing, in substance, different about this topic.

Just as is true for Iraq, we have been subjected to a carousel of ever-changing, unrelated "justifications" as to why Iran is our mortal enemy against whom war is necessary. First was the alarm-ringing over Iran's alleged pursuit of nuclear weapons. Then, the President began featuring the (highly misleading) claim that Iran is the "leading sponsor of international terrorism." That was followed by an unrelenting emphasis on the ugly statements from Iran's President (but not its "leader"), Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Now the emphasis has shifted to Iran's alleged (but entirely unproven and apparently overstated) fueling of the civil war in Iraq.

The only clear fact that emerges from this morass of war-fueling claims is that there are significant and influential factions within the country which want to drive the U.S. to wage war against Iran and change its government. What matters to them is that this goal is achieved. The "justifications" which enable it do not seem to matter at all. Whatever does the trick will be used. Candid and explicit debates over these issues -- and clear, emphatic opposition to the course the President is clearly pursuing with regard to Iran -- is urgently necessary.

If all we have are the type of delicate, fear-driven, partial "debates" which we had over Iraq and the muddled, ambivalent, politically fearful positions from our political leaders that preceded the Iraq invasion, then we will have the same result with Iran as we had with Iraq. And there just is no more pressing priority than ensuring that does not happen. But, at this point at least, one searches in vain for the political leaders who are committed to stopping it. The Wes Clark humiliation and punishment ritual was intended to deter exactly such opposition, and it seems to be achieving its objective rather well.

A Reality-based foreign policy

2007-02-01T00:21:00.000-08:00

SENATE FOREIGN RELATIONS COMMITEE TESTIMONY -- ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI (former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski)
February 1, 2007

Mr. Chairman:

Your hearings come at a critical juncture in the U.S. war of choice in Iraq, and I commend you and Senator Lugar for scheduling them.

It is time for the White House to come to terms with two central realities:

1. The war in Iraq is a historic, strategic, and moral calamity. Undertaken under false assumptions, it is undermining America's global legitimacy. Its collateral civilian casualties as well as some abuses are tarnishing America's moral credentials. Driven by Manichean impulses and imperial hubris, it is intensifying regional instability.

2. Only a political strategy that is historically relevant rather than reminiscent of colonial tutelage can provide the needed framework for a tolerable resolution of both the war in Iraq and the intensifying regional tensions.

If the United States continues to be bogged down in a protracted bloody involvement in Iraq, the final destination on this downhill track is likely to be a head-on conflict with Iran and with much of the world of Islam at large. A plausible scenario for a military collision with Iran involves Iraqi failure to meet the benchmarks; followed by accusations of Iranian responsibility for the failure; then by some provocation in Iraq or a terrorist act in the U.S. blamed on Iran; culminating in a "defensive" U.S. military action against Iran that plunges a lonely America into a spreading and deepening quagmire eventually ranging across Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.

A mythical historical narrative to justify the case for such a protracted and potentially expanding war is already being articulated. Initially justified by false claims about WMD's in Iraq, the war is now being redefined as the "decisive ideological struggle" of our time, reminiscent of the earlier collisions with Nazism and Stalinism. In that context, Islamist extremism and al Qaeda are presented as the equivalents of the threat posed by Nazi Germany and then Soviet Russia, and 9/11 as the equivalent of the Pearl Harbor attack which precipitated America's involvement in World War II.

This simplistic and demagogic narrative overlooks the fact that Nazism was based on the military power of the industrially most advanced European state; and that Stalinism was able to mobilize not only the resources of the victorious and militarily powerful Soviet Union but also had worldwide appeal through its Marxist doctrine. In contrast, most Muslims are not embracing Islamic fundamentalism; al Qaeda is an isolated fundamentalist Islamist aberration; most Iraqis are engaged in strife because the American occupation of Iraq destroyed the Iraqi state; while Iran -- though gaining in regional influence -- is itself politically divided, economically and militarily weak. To argue that America is already at war in the region with a wider Islamic threat, of which Iran is the epicenter, is to promote a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Deplorably, the Administration's foreign policy in the Middle East region has lately relied almost entirely on such sloganeering. Vague and inflammatory talk about "a new strategic context" which is based on "clarity" and which prompts "the birth pangs of a new Middle East" is breeding intensifying anti-Americanism and is increasing the danger of a long-term collision between the United States and the Islamic world. Those in charge of U.S. diplomacy have also adopted a posture of moralistic self-ostracism toward Iran strongly reminiscent of John Foster Dulles's attitude of the early 1950's toward Chinese Communist leaders (resulting among other things in the well-known episode of the refused handshake). It took some two decades and a half before another Republican president was finally able to undo that legacy.

One should note here also that practically no country in the world shares the Manichean delusions that the Administration so passionately articulates. The result is growing political isolation of, and pervasive popular antagonism toward the U.S. global posture.

It is obvious by now that the American national interest calls for a significant change of direction. There is in fact a dominant consensus in favor of a change: American public opinion now holds that the war was a mistake; that it should not be escalated, that a regional political process should be explored; and that an Israeli-Palestinian accommodation is an essential element of the needed policy alteration and should be actively pursued. It is noteworthy that profound reservations regarding the Administration's policy have been voiced by a number of leading Republicans. One need only invoke here the expressed views of the much admired President Gerald Ford, former Secretary of State James Baker, former National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft and several leading Republican senators, John Warner, Chuck Hagel, and Gordon Smith among others.

The urgent need today is for a strategy that seeks to create a political framework for a resolution of the problems posed both by the US occupation of Iraq and by the ensuing civil and sectarian conflict. Ending the occupation and shaping a regional security dialogue should be the mutually reinforcing goals of such a strategy, but both goals will take time and require a genuinely serious U.S. commitment.

The quest for a political solution for the growing chaos in Iraq should involve four steps:

1. The United States should reaffirm explicitly and unambiguously its determination to leave Iraq in a reasonably short period of time.

Ambiguity regarding the duration of the occupation in fact encourages unwillingness to compromise and intensifies the on-going civil strife. Moreover, such a public declaration is needed to allay fears in the Middle East of a new and enduring American imperial hegemony. Right or wrong, many view the establishment of such a hegemony as the primary reason for the American intervention in a region only recently free of colonial domination. That perception should be discredited from the highest U.S. level. Perhaps the U.S. Congress could do so by a joint resolution.

2. The United States should announce that it is undertaking talks with the Iraqi leaders to jointly set with them a date by which U.S. military disengagement should be completed, and the resulting setting of such a date should be announced as a joint decision. In the meantime, the U.S. should avoid military escalation.

It is necessary to engage all Iraqi leaders -- including those who do not reside within "the Green Zone" -- in a serious discussion regarding the proposed and jointly defined date for U.S. military disengagement because the very dialogue itself will help identify the authentic Iraqi leaders with the self-confidence and capacity to stand on their own legs without U.S. military protection. Only Iraqi leaders who can exercise real power beyond "the Green Zone" can eventually reach a genuine Iraqi accommodation. The painful reality is that much of the current Iraqi regime, characterized by the Bush administration as "representative of the Iraqi people," defines itself largely by its physical location: the 4 sq. miles-large U.S. fortress within Baghdad, protected by a wall in places 15 feet thick, manned by heavily armed U.S. military, popularly known as "the Green Zone."

3. The United States should issue jointly with appropriate Iraqi leaders, or perhaps let the Iraqi leaders issue, an invitation to all neighbors of Iraq (and perhaps some other Muslim countries such as Egypt, Morocco, Algeria, and Pakistan) to engage in a dialogue regarding how best to enhance stability in Iraq in conjunction with U.S. military disengagement and to participate eventually in a conference regarding regional stability.

The United States and the Iraqi leadership need to engage Iraq's neighbors in serious discussion regarding the region's security problems, but such discussions cannot be undertaken while the U.S. is perceived as an occupier for an indefinite duration. Iran and Syria have no reason to help the United States consolidate a permanent regional hegemony. It is ironic, however, that both Iran and Syria have lately called for a regional dialogue, exploiting thereby the self-defeating character of the largely passive -- and mainly sloganeering -- U.S. diplomacy.

A serious regional dialogue, promoted directly or indirectly by the U.S., could be buttressed at some point by a wider circle of consultations involving other powers with a stake in the region's stability, such as the EU, China, Japan, India, and Russia. Members of this Committee might consider exploring informally with the states mentioned their potential interest in such a wider dialogue.

4. Concurrently, the United States should activate a credible and energetic effort to finally reach an Israeli-Palestinian peace, making it clear in the process as to what the basic parameters of such a final accommodation ought to involve.

The United States needs to convince the region that the U.S. is committed both to Israel's enduring security and to fairness for the Palestinians who have waited for more than forty years now for their own separate state. Only an external and activist intervention can promote the long-delayed settlement for the record shows that the Israelis and the Palestinians will never do so on their own. Without such a settlement, both nationalist and fundamentalist passions in the region will in the longer run doom any Arab regime which is perceived as supportive of U.S. regional hegemony.

After World War II, the United States prevailed in the defense of democracy in Europe because it successfully pursued a long-term political strategy of uniting its friends and dividing its enemies, of soberly deterring aggression without initiating hostilities, all the while also exploring the possibility of negotiated arrangements. Today, America's global leadership is being tested in the Middle East. A similarly wise strategy of genuinely constructive political engagement is now urgently needed.

It is also time for the Congress to assert itself.

The President of the United States and Secretary of State would restore some of their lost luster by making some combination of James Baker, Lee Hamilton, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and Brent Scowcroft co-Middle East Envoys to help take this penultimate quagmire we are in a direction that might start a virtuous cycle of possibilities rather than the disaster that is unfolding.

Faith Based SOTU...or why this President scares me to death

2007-01-24T22:43:00.000-08:00

Churchillian it was not. Yet the State of the Union seemed a success if Bush's purpose was to buy time from Congress to wait and see if his surge of US forces into Iraq might yet succeed.

But when Bush started to describe the ideological war we are in, one began to understand why we are in the mess we are in.

"This war," said Bush, "is an ideological struggle. ... To prevail, we must remove the conditions that inspire blind hatred and drove 19 men to get onto airplanes and to come to kill us."

But the "conditions" that drove those 19 men "to come to kill us" is our dominance of their world, our authoritarian allies, and Israel.

They were over here because we are over there.

If Bush is going to remove those "conditions," he is going to have to get us out of the Middle East. Is he prepared to do that? Of course not. Because Bush, believing the problem is not our pervasive presence but the lack of freedom in the Middle East, is waging his own ideological war to bring freedom in by force of arms, if necessary.

"What every terrorist fears most is human freedom – societies where men and women make their own choices."

Very American. But the truth is terrorists do not fear free societies, they flourish in them. The suicide bombers of 9/11, Madrid, and London all plotted their atrocities in free societies. From the Red Brigades, who murdered Italy's Aldo Mori, to the Baader-Meinhoff Gang, who tried to kill Al Haig, to the Basque ETA, the IRA and the Puerto Rican terrorists who tried to assassinate Harry Truman, free societies are where they do their most effective work.

Stalin's Russia and Nazi Germany had no trouble with terrorists.

"Free people are not drawn to violent and malignant ideologies," declared Bush. Oh? Explain, then, why 70 million Germans, under the most democratic government in their history, gave more than half their votes to Nazis and Communists in 1933? In every plebiscite he held, Hitler won a landslide. In the year of Anschluss and Munich, 1938, Hitler was Time's Man of the Year and far more popular than FDR, who lost 71 seats in the House.

During 2006, free Latin peoples brought to power anti-American Leftists Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, Evo Morales in Bolivia, Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua and Rafael Correa in Ecuador, and came close to electing their comrades Ollanta Humala in Peru and Andrés Manuel López-Obrador in Mexico.

In the free elections Bush demanded in Egypt, Lebanon, Palestine and Iraq, the winners were the Muslim Brotherhood, Hezbollah, Hamas and Shi'ite militants with ties to Iran.

If a referendum were held in the Middle East on the proposition of the US military out and Israel gone, how does Bush think it would come out?

"So we advance our security interests by helping moderates, reformers and brave voices for democracy," said Bush. But how many of those "moderates" – Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Morocco, Kuwait, the Gulf States – are ruled "by brave voices for democracy"?

Our Islamist enemies would likely endorse unanimously a Bush call for free elections in all those countries, as elections could not but help advance to greater power, at the expense of our friends, those same Islamist enemies.

What is Bush doing? The America that won the Cold War said ideology be damned, we stand by our friends.

"The great question of our day is whether America will help men and women in the Middle East to build free societies," said Bush.

But if we bleed our country to give the men and women of the Middle East the freedom to choose the society they wish to live in, are we sure they will not choose a society where Sharia is law? In liberated Afghanistan, popular sentiment was behind beheading a Muslim who converted to Christianity.

What leads Bush to believe everyone wants to be like us? Is it not ideology?

To characterize "the totalitarian ideology" we confront, Bush quoted Osama bin Laden: "Death is better than living on this Earth with the unbelievers among us."

This is the true mark of the true believer. But did not the Spain of Isabella want the "unbelievers" removed from "among us"? Did not Elizabeth I feel the same about Catholics?

"Give me liberty or give me death!" said Patrick Henry of the Brits remaining in this country that Brits had founded. "Live free or die!" is the motto of the great state of New Hampshire.

This is the heart of the war we are in. Americans believe in freedom first. Millions of Muslims believe in Islam first – submission to Allah. We decide for us. Do we also decide for them?

Do you hear what I hear?

2007-01-10T10:52:00.000-08:00

Let’s think about what we will, and won’t hear tonight from Bush. We’ll hear that we can’t afford to abandon the Iraqis now, because if we do, somehow the Shiite and Sunni militias will come to LA and blow us up. As for Al Qaeda, we’ll hear about how we need to stay in Iraq to fight them, when they weren’t there before Bush let them in, but we won’t hear why Bin Laden has run free for five years now after Bush let him go at Tora Bora.

We will hear that it is everyone else’s fault that things haven’t gone well. We will hear for example that not enough troops were sent to Iraq, without any mention of General Eric Shinseki, yet implicitly the blame will be placed on Rummy and Wolfie’s shoulders. We will hear that the generals were wrong with their strategies to date, but that President Bystander is now taking charge to make sure things are done right. And we may hear that the Iraqis have dropped the ball, but we won’t hear that this administration has been a willing partner if not enabler of that failure. Yet, we will hear that we need to support the Iraqis and hold them to benchmarks that Bush has previously resisted.

We won’t hear the following:

a) How long the troops will be there;
b) How Bush will pay for this escalation;
c) What these troops will be doing and where they’ll be coming from;
d) Any talk about sealing the borders;
e) Any willingness to talk with Iraq’s neighbors;
f) Any detailed reason why he is ignoring most of the ISG report.
g) Any discussion why members of his own party oppose him.

What you will hear is another proposal that isn’t much different from his previous reasons for sending troops into Iraq. But what you won’t hear is that Bush is demanding of the Iraqis that 75% of their oil production and profits go to the same companies that sat on Dick Cheney’s Energy Task Force.

That, in the end, is one of the two reasons why we will not be leaving Iraq anytime soon. We need to add troops to maintain whatever security we can until all the deals are done and signed with Big Oil, and of course we cannot leave until Bush has left office, as that would be an admission of his failure.

Former Reagan Aid Compares Bush To Hitler

2007-01-09T10:14:00.000-08:00

The new year began on the hopeful note that Bush’s illegal war in Iraq would soon be ended. The repudiation of Bush and the Republicans in the November congressional election, the Iraq Study Group’s unanimous conclusion that the US needs to remove its troops from the sectarian strife Bush set in motion by invading Iraq, Donald Rumsfeld’s removal as defense secretary and his replacement by Iraqi Study Group member Robert Gates, the thumbs down given by America’s top military commanders to the neoconservatives’ plan to send more US troops to Iraq, and new polls of the US military that reveal that only a minority supports Bush’s Iraq policy, thus giving new meaning to "support the troops," are all indications that Americans have shed the stupor that has given carte blanche to George W. Bush.

When word leaked that Bush was inclined toward the "surge option" of committing more troops by keeping existing troops deployed in Iraq after their replacements had arrived, NBC News reported that an administration official "admitted to us today that this surge option is more of a political decision than a military one." It is a clear sign of exasperation with Bush when an administration official admits that Bush is willing to sacrifice American troops and Iraqi civilians in order to protect his own delusions.

The American establishment, concerned by Bush’s egregious mismanagement, moved to take control of Iraq policy away from him. However, recent news reports and analysis suggest that Bush has turned his back to the American establishment and his military advisers and is throwing in his lot with the neoconservatives and the Israeli lobby. This will further isolate Bush and make him more vulnerable to impeachment.

In the January 5 issue of CounterPunch John Walsh gives a good description of the struggle between the American establishment and the neocons.

Peter Spiegel, the Pentagon correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, reported on January 4 that the neocons have used the failure of the administration’s policy in Iraq to convince Bush to launch an aggressive counterinsurgency requiring the buildup of troop levels by extending deployments beyond the agreed terms.

Raed Jarrar suggests that the Shi’ite militias, such as the one led by Sadr, are the intended targets of the "surge option." There seems no surer way to escalate the conflict in Iraq than to attack the Shi’ite militias. For longer than the US fought Germany in WWII, 150,000 US troops in Iraq have been thwarted by a small insurgency drawn from Iraq’s minority population of Sunnis. It hardly seems feasible that 30,000 additional US troops, demoralized by extended deployment, can succeed in a surge against the Shi’ite militias when 150,000 US troops cannot succeed against the minority Sunnis.

The reason the US has not been driven out of Iraq is that the majority Shi’ites have not been part of the insurgency. The Shi’ites are attacking the Sunnis, who are forced to fight a two-front war against US troops and Shi’ite militias and death squads.The US owes its presence in Iraq, just as the colonial powers always owed their presence in the Middle East, to the disunity of Arabs. Western domination of the Muslim world succeeded by not picking a fight with all of the disunited Arabs at the same time.

Attacking the Shi’ite militias while fighting a Sunni insurgency would violate this rule. If Bush ignores US military commanders and expert opinion and accepts the surge option advanced by the delusional neocon allies of Israel’s right-wing Likud Party, US troops will be engulfed in general insurgency. This is why General John Abizaid resigned on January 5. He wants no part of the Republican Party’s sacrifice of US soldiers to sectarian conflict.

In recent Senate Armed Services Committee hearings, Republican Senator John McCain, who believes in the efficacy of violence and not in diplomacy, pressed General Abizaid to request more US troops to be sent to Iraq. General Abizaid replied as follows:

"Senator McCain, I met with every divisional commander, General Casey, the core commander, General Dempsey, we all talked together. And I said, in your professional opinion, if we were to bring in more American troops now, does it add considerably to our ability to achieve success in Iraq? And they all said no."

Bush is like Hitler. He blames defeats on his military commanders, not on his own insane policy. Like Hitler, he protects himself from reality with delusion. In his last hours, Hitler was ordering non-existent German armies to drive the Russians from Berlin.

By manipulating Bush and provoking a military crisis in which the US stands to lose its army in Iraq, the neoconservatives hope to revive the implementation of their plan for US conquest of the Middle East. They believe they can use fear, "honor," and the aversion of macho Americans to ignoble defeat to expand the conflict in response to military disaster. The neocons believe that the loss of an American army would be met with the electorate’s demand for revenge. The barriers to the draft would fall, as would the barriers to the use of nuclear weapons.

Neocon godfather Norman Podhoretz set out the plan for Middle East conquest several years ago in Commentary magazine. It is a plan for Muslim genocide. In place of physical extermination of Muslims, Podhoretz advocates their cultural destruction by deracination. Islam is to be torn out by the roots and reduced to a purely formal shell devoid of any real beliefs.

Podhoretz disguises the neoconservative attack against diversity with contrived arguments, but its real purpose is to use the US military to subdue Arabs and to create space for Israel to expand.

Not enough Americans are aware that this is what the "war on terror" is all about.

(reprinted from The Surge: Political Cover or Escalation? by Paul Craig Roberts)

A War Story

2006-12-14T14:45:00.000-08:00

Once upon a time, there was a retired general named Paul van Riper. In 1966, as a young Marine officer and American adviser in Vietnam, he was wounded in action; he later became the first president of the Marine Corps University, retired from the Corps as a lieutenant general, and then took up the task of leading the enemy side in Pentagon war games.

Over the years, van Riper had developed into a freewheeling military thinker, given to quoting von Clausewitz and Sun-tzu, and dubious about the ability of the latest technology to conquer all in its path. If you wanted to wage war, he thought, it might at least be reasonable to study war seriously (if not go to war yourself) rather than just fall in love with military power. It seemed to him that you took a risk any time you dismissed your enemy as without resources (or a prayer) against your awesome power and imagined your campaign to come as a surefire "cakewalk." As he pointed out, "Many enemies are not frightened by that overwhelming force. They put their minds to the problem and think through: how can I adapt and avoid that overwhelming force and yet do damage against the United States?"

As a result, van Riper took the task of simulated enemy commander quite seriously. He also had a few issues with Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's much vaunted "military transformation," his desire to create a sleek, high-tech, agile military that would drive everything before it. He thought the Rumsfeld program added up to just so many "shallow," "fundamentally flawed" slogans. ("There's very little intellectual content to what they say. … 'Information dominance,' 'network-centric warfare,' 'focused logistics' – you could fill a book with all of these slogans.")

In July 2002, he got the chance to test that proposition. At the cost of a quarter-billion dollars, the Pentagon launched the most elaborate war games in its history, immodestly entitled "Millennium Challenge 02." These involved all four services in "17 simulation locations and nine live-force training sites." Officially a war against a fictional country in the Persian Gulf region – but obviously Iraq – it was specifically scripted to prove the efficacy of the Rumsfeld-style invasion that the Bush administration had already decided to launch.

Lt. Gen. van Riper commanded the "Red Team" – the Iraqis of this simulation -– against the "Blue Team," U.S. forces; and, unfortunately for Rumsfeld, he promptly stepped out of the script. Knowing that sometimes the only effective response to high-tech warfare was the lowest tech warfare imaginable, he employed some of the very techniques the Iraqi insurgency would begin to use all-too-successfully a year or two later.

Such simple devices as, according to the Army Times, using "motorcycle messengers to transmit orders, negating Blue's high-tech eavesdropping capabilities," and "issuing attack orders via the morning call to prayer broadcast from the minarets of his country's mosques." In the process, van Riper trumped the techies.

"At one point in the game," as Fred Kaplan of Slate wrote in March 2003, "when Blue's fleet entered the Persian Gulf, he sank some of the ships with suicide-bombers in speed boats. (At that point, the managers stopped the game, 'refloated' the Blue fleet, and resumed play.)" After three or four days, with the Blue Team in obvious disarray, the game was halted and the rules rescripted. In a quiet protest, van Riper stepped down as enemy commander.

Millennium Challenge 02 was subsequently written up as a vindication of Rumsfeld's "military transformation." On that basis – with no one paying more mind to van Riper (who, this April, called openly for Rumsfeld's resignation) than to Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki when, in February 2003, he pointed out that hundreds of thousands of troops would be needed to occupy Iraq, the "transformational" invasion was launched – with all the predictably catastrophic results now so widely known.

The Millennium Challenge 02 war games were already underway when, late that July, Sir Richard Dearlove, head of MI6 (the British equivalent of the CIA), returned to London from high-level meetings in Washington to report to Prime Minister Tony Blair and his top officials. In a secret meeting, he told them that the decision for war in Iraq had already been made by the Bush administration and that now, in a memorable phrase, "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."

On May 1, 2005, notes from this meeting, dubbed "the Downing Street Memo," were leaked to the London Sunday Times. Thanks to that memo and other documents, it's now commonly accepted that the Bush administration "fixed" the intelligence around their war of choice. But Lt. Gen. van Riper's forgotten story should remind us that they also "fixed" the war they were planning to fight.

Between then and now, when it came to Iraq, there wasn't much that wasn't "fixed" in a similar manner. Only recently, James A. Baker's Iraq Study Group report described the way levels of violence in Iraq were grossly underreported by U.S. intelligence officials – in one case, only 93 "attacks or significant acts of violence" being officially recorded on a day when the number was well above 1,000. As the report politely summed up this particular fix-it-up methodology, "Good policy is difficult to make when information is systematically collected in a way that minimizes its discrepancy with policy goals."

But here's the thing: The Iraq Study Group, too – like every other mainstream gathering of advisers, officials, or pundits – "fixed" the intelligence. Think of the ISG as the clean-up-crew version of the Blue Team of Millennium Challenge 02. Before they even began, Bush family consigliere Baker and cohorts ensured that, while the ISG would be filled with notable movers and shakers from numerous previous administrations, no one on it, nor any expert "team" advising it would represent the one point of view that a majority of Americans have by now come to support – actual withdrawal of all U.S. forces from Iraq on a set timeline.

You would not, for instance, find retired Lt. Gen. William E. Odom, the former director of the National Security Agency, who has openly called for the U.S. to "cut and run" from Iraq, on the panel. Despite the report's harsh descriptions of the last three years of failed policy and some perfectly sane negotiation suggestions, it dismissed the idea of such a withdrawal out of hand – because such a dismissal was simply built into the group's very make up.

It turns out, of course, that when you control both sides of a war game or the range of opinion on a panel, you are assured of the results you're going to get. The problem comes when you only control one side of a situation; and when, as American commanders learned in the early days of the Korean War and again in Vietnam, whether due to racism or imperial blindness, you also discount and disrespect your enemies.

Unfortunately for the Bush administration, it turned out that, while you could fix the war games and the intelligence, you couldn't be assured of fixing reality itself, which has a tendency to remain obdurately, passionately, irascibly unconquerable. Yes, you could ignore reality for a while. (The president, when being told a few hard Iraqi truths in 2004 by Col. Derek Harvey, the Defense Intelligence Agency's senior intelligence officer for Iraq, reportedly turned to his aides and asked, "Is this guy a Democrat?") But you couldn't do it forever, not when the Lt. Gen. van Ripers of Iraq refused to step aside and you weren't capable of removing them; not when you couldn't even figure out, most of the time, who they were. It was then that the fixers first found themselves in a genuine fix, from which none of Washington's movers and shakers have yet been willing to extract themselves.

Krugman on "the great wealth transfer"

2006-12-13T20:51:00.000-08:00

Why doesn't Bush get credit for the strong economy?" That question has been asked over and over again in recent months by political pundits. After all, they point out, the gross domestic product is up; unemployment, at least according to official figures, is low by historical standards; and stocks have recovered much of the ground they lost in the early years of the decade, with the Dow surpassing 12,000 for the first time. Yet the public remains deeply unhappy with the state of the economy. In a recent poll, only a minority of Americans rated the economy as "excellent" or "good," while most consider it no better than "fair" or "poor."

Are people just ungrateful? Is the administration failing to get its message out? Are the news media, as conservatives darkly suggest, deliberately failing to report the good news?

None of the above. The reason most Americans think the economy is fair to poor is simple: For most Americans, it really is fair to poor. Wages have failed to keep up with rising prices. Even in 2005, a year in which the economy grew quite fast, the income of most non-elderly families lagged behind inflation. The number of Americans in poverty has risen even in the face of an official economic recovery, as has the number of Americans without health insurance. Most Americans are little, if any, better off than they were last year and definitely worse off than they were in 2000.

But how is this possible? The economic pie is getting bigger -- how can it be true that most Americans are getting smaller slices? The answer, of course, is that a few people are getting much, much bigger slices. Although wages have stagnated since Bush took office, corporate profits have doubled. The gap between the nation's CEOs and average workers is now ten times greater than it was a generation ago. And while Bush's tax cuts shaved only a few hundred dollars off the tax bills of most Americans, they saved the richest one percent more than $44,000 on average. In fact, once all of Bush's tax cuts take effect, it is estimated that those with incomes of more than $200,000 a year -- the richest five percent of the population -- will pocket almost half of the money. Those who make less than $75,000 a year -- eighty percent of America -- will receive barely a quarter of the cuts. In the Bush era, economic inequality is on the rise.

Rising inequality isn't new. The gap between rich and poor started growing before Ronald Reagan took office, and it continued to widen through the Clinton years. But what is happening under Bush is something entirely unprecedented: For the first time in our history, so much growth is being siphoned off to a small, wealthy minority that most Americans are failing to gain ground even during a time of economic growth -- and they know it.

A merica has never been an egalitarian society, but during the New Deal and the Second World War, government policies and organized labor combined to create a broad and solid middle class. The economic historians Claudia Goldin and Robert Margo call what happened between 1933 and 1945 the Great Compression: The rich got dramatically poorer while workers got considerably richer. Americans found themselves sharing broadly similar lifestyles in a way not seen since before the Civil War.

But in the 1970s, inequality began increasing again -- slowly at first, then more and more rapidly. You can see how much things have changed by comparing the state of affairs at America's largest employer, then and now. In 1969, General Motors was the country's largest corporation aside from AT&T, which enjoyed a government-guaranteed monopoly on phone service. GM paid its chief executive, James M. Roche, a salary of $795,000 -- the equivalent of $4.2 million today, adjusting for inflation. At the time, that was considered very high. But nobody denied that ordinary GM workers were paid pretty well. The average paycheck for production workers in the auto industry was almost $8,000 -- more than $45,000 today. GM workers, who also received excellent health and retirement benefits, were considered solidly in the middle class.

Today, Wal-Mart is America's largest corporation, with 1.3 million employees. H. Lee Scott, its chairman, is paid almost $23 million -- more than five times Roche's inflation-adjusted salary. Yet Scott's compensation excites relatively little comment, since it's not exceptional for the CEO of a large corporation these days. The wages paid to Wal-Mart's workers, on the other hand, do attract attention, because they are low even by current standards. On average, Wal-Mart's non-supervisory employees are paid $18,000 a year, far less than half what GM workers were paid thirty-five years ago, adjusted for inflation. And Wal-Mart is notorious both for how few of its workers receive health benefits and for the stinginess of those scarce benefits.

The broader picture is equally dismal. According to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics, the hourly wage of the average American non-supervisory worker is actually lower, adjusted for inflation, than it was in 1970. Meanwhile, CEO pay has soared -- from less than thirty times the average wage to almost 300 times the typical worker's pay.

The widening gulf between workers and executives is part of a stunning increase in inequality throughout the U.S. economy during the past thirty years. To get a sense of just how dramatic that shift has been, imagine a line of 1,000 people who represent the entire population of America. They are standing in ascending order of income, with the poorest person on the left and the richest person on the right. And their height is proportional to their income -- the richer they are, the taller they are.

Start with 1973. If you assume that a height of six feet represents the average income in that year, the person on the far left side of the line -- representing those Americans living in extreme poverty -- is only sixteen inches tall. By the time you get to the guy at the extreme right, he towers over the line at more than 113 feet.

Now take 2005. The average height has grown from six feet to eight feet, reflecting the modest growth in average incomes over the past generation. And the poorest people on the left side of the line have grown at about the same rate as those near the middle -- the gap between the middle class and the poor, in other words, hasn't changed. But people to the right must have been taking some kind of extreme steroids: The guy at the end of the line is now 560 feet tall, almost five times taller than his 1973 counterpart.

What's useful about this image is that it explodes several comforting myths we like to tell ourselves about what is happening to our society.

MYTH #1: INEQUALITY IS MAINLY A PROBLEM OF POVERTY.
According to this view, most Americans are sharing in the economy's growth, with only a small minority at the bottom left behind. That places the onus for change on middle-class Americans who -- so the story goes -- will have to sacrifice some of their prosperity if they want to see poverty alleviated.

But as our line illustrates, that's just plain wrong. It's not only the poor who have fallen behind -- the normal-size people in the middle of the line haven't grown much, either. The real divergence in fortunes is between the great majority of Americans and a very small, extremely wealthy minority at the far right of the line.

MYTH #2: INEQUALITY IS MAINLY A PROBLEM OF EDUCATION.
This view -- which I think of as the eighty-twenty fallacy -- is expressed by none other than Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the Federal Reserve. Last year, Greenspan testified that wage gains were going primarily to skilled professionals with college educations -- "essentially," he said, "the top twenty percent." The other eighty percent -- those with less education -- are stuck in routine jobs being replaced by computers or lost to imports. Inequality, Greenspan concluded, is ultimately "an education problem."

It's a good story with a comforting conclusion: Education is the answer. But it's all wrong. A closer look at our line of Americans reveals why. The richest twenty percent are those standing between 800 and 1,000. But even those standing between 800 and 950 -- Americans who earn between $80,000 and $120,000 a year -- have done only slightly better than everyone to their left. Almost all of the gains over the past thirty years have gone to the fifty people at the very end of the line. Being highly educated won't make you into a winner in today's U.S. economy. At best, it makes you somewhat less of a loser.

MYTH #3: INEQUALITY DOESN'T REALLY MATTER.
In this view, America is the land of opportunity, where a poor young man or woman can vault into the upper class. In fact, while modest moves up and down the economic ladder are common, true Horatio Alger stories are very rare. America actually has less social mobility than other advanced countries: These days, Horatio Alger has moved to Canada or Finland. It's easier for a poor child to make it into the upper-middle class in just about every other advanced country -- including famously class-conscious Britain -- than it is in the United States.

Not only can few Americans hope to join the ranks of the rich, no matter how well educated or hardworking they may be -- their opportunities to do so are actually shrinking. As best we can tell, pretax incomes are now as unequally distributed as they were in the 1920s -- wiping out virtually all of the gains made by the middle class during the Great Compression.

There's a famous scene in the 1987 movie Wall Street in which Gordon Gekko, the corporate predator played by Michael Douglas, tells a meeting of stunned shareholders that greed is good, that the unbridled pursuit of individual wealth serves the interests of the company and the nation. In the movie, Gekko gets his comeuppance; in real life, the Gordon Gekkos took over both corporate America and, eventually, our political system.

Oliver Stone didn't conjure Gekko's "greed" line out of thin air. It was based on a real speech given by corporate raider Ivan Boesky -- and it reflected what many corporate executives, conservative intellectuals and right-wing politicians were saying at the time.

It's no coincidence that ringing endorsements of greed began to be heard at the same time that the actual incomes of America's rich began to soar. In part, the new pro-greed ideology was a way of rationalizing what was already happening. But it was also, to an important extent, a cause of the phenomenon. In the past thirty years, right-wing foundations have devoted enormous resources to promoting this agenda, building a far-reaching network of think tanks, media outlets and conservative scholars to legitimize higher levels of inequality. "On average, corporate America pays its most important leaders like bureaucrats," the Harvard Business Review lamented in 1990, calling for higher pay for top executives. "Is it any wonder then that so many CEOs act like bureaucrats?"

Although corporate executives have always had the power to pay themselves lavishly, their self-enrichment was limited by what Lucian Bebchuk, Jesse Fried and David Walker -- the leading experts on exploding executive paychecks -- call the "outrage constraint." What they mean is that a conspicuously self-dealing CEO would be forced to moderate his greed by unions, the press and politicians: The social climate itself condemned executive salaries that seem immodest.

Lately, however, we have experienced a death of outrage. Thanks to the right's well-funded and organized effort, corporate executives now feel no shame in lining their pockets with huge bonuses and gigantic stock options. Such self-dealing is justified, they say: Greed is what made America great, and greedy executives are exactly what corporate America needs.

At the same time, there has been a concerted attack on the institutions that have helped moderate inequality -- in particular, unions. During the Great Compression, the rate of unionization nearly tripled; by 1945, more than one in three American workers belonged to a union. A lot of what made General Motors the relatively egalitarian institution it was in the 1960s had to do with its powerful union, which was able to demand high wages for its members. Those wages, in turn, set a standard that elevated the income of workers who didn't belong to unions. But today, in the era of Wal-Mart, fewer than one in eleven workers in the private sector is organized -- effectively preventing hundreds of thousands of working Americans from joining the middle class.

Why isn't Wal-Mart unionized? The answer is simple and brutal: Business interests went on the offensive against unions. And we're not talking about gentle persuasion; we're talking about hardball tactics. During the late 1970s and early 1980s, at least one in every twenty workers who voted for a union was illegally fired; some estimates put the number as high as one in eight. And once Ronald Reagan took office, the anti-union campaign was aided and abetted by political support at the highest levels.

Unions weren't the only institution that fostered income equality during the generation that followed the Great Compression. The creation of a national minimum wage also set a benchmark for the entire economy, boosting the bargaining position of workers. But under Reagan, Congress failed to raise the minimum wage, allowing its value to be eroded by inflation. Between 1981 and 1989, the minimum wage remained the same in dollar terms -- but inflation shrank its purchasing power by twenty-five percent, reducing it to the lowest level since the 1950s.

After Reagan left office, there was a partial reversal of his anti-labor policies. The minimum wage was increased under the elder Bush and again under Clinton, restoring about half the ground it lost under Reagan. But then came Bush the Second -- and the balance of power shifted against workers and the middle class to a degree not seen since the Gilded Age.

During the 2000 election campaign, George W. Bush joked that his base consisted of the "haves and the have mores." But it wasn't much of a joke. Not only has the Bush administration favored the interests of the wealthiest few Americans over those of the middle class, it has consistently shown a preference for people who get their income from dividends and capital gains, rather than those who work for a living.

Under Bush, the economy has been growing at a reasonable pace for the past three years. But most Americans have failed to benefit from that growth. All indicators of the economic status of ordinary Americans -- poverty rates, family incomes, the number of people without health insurance -- show that most of us were worse off in 2005 than we were in 2000, and there's little reason to think that 2006 was much better.

So where did all the economic growth go? It went to a relative handful of people at the top. The earnings of the typical full-time worker, adjusted for inflation, have actually fallen since Bush took office. Pay for CEOs, meanwhile, has soared -- from 185 times that of average workers in 2003 to 279 times in 2005. And after-tax corporate profits have also skyrocketed, more than doubling since Bush took office. Those profits will eventually be reflected in dividends and capital gains, which accrue mainly to the very well-off: More than three-quarters of all stocks are owned by the richest ten percent of the population.

Bush wasn't directly responsible for the stagnation of wages and the surge in profits and executive compensation: The White House doesn't set wage rates or give CEOs stock options. But the government can tilt the balance of power between workers and bosses in many ways -- and at every juncture, this government has favored the bosses. There are four ways, in particular, that the Bush administration has helped make the poor poorer and the rich richer.

First, like Reagan, Bush has stood firmly against any increase in the minimum wage, even as inflation erodes the value of a dollar. The minimum wage was last raised in 1997; since then, inflation has cut the purchasing power of a minimum-wage worker's paycheck by twenty percent.

Second, again like Reagan, Bush has used the government's power to make it harder for workers to organize. The National Labor Relations Board, founded to protect the ability of workers to organize, has become for all practical purposes an agent of employers trying to prevent unionization. A spectacular example of this anti-union bias came just a few months ago. Under U.S. labor law, legal protections for union organizing do not extend to supervisors. But the Republican majority on the NLRB ruled that otherwise ordinary line workers who occasionally tell others what to do -- such as charge nurses, who primarily care for patients but also give instructions to other nurses on the same shift -- will now be considered supervisors. In a single administrative stroke, the Bush administration stripped as many as 8 million workers of their right to unionize.

Third, the administration effectively blocked what might have been a post-Enron backlash against self-dealing corporate insiders. Corporate scandals dominated the news in the first half of 2002 -- but then the subject was changed to the urgent need to invade Iraq, and the drive for reform was squelched. With Americans focused on the war, CEOs are once again rewarding themselves at impressive -- and unprecedented -- levels.

Finally, there's the government's most direct method of affecting incomes: taxes. In this arena, Bush has made sure that the rich pay lower taxes than they have in decades. According to the latest estimates, once the Bush tax cuts have taken full effect, more than a third of the cash will go to people making more than $500,000 a year -- a mere 0.8 percent of the population.

It's easy to get confused about the Bush tax cuts. For one thing, they are designed to confuse. The core of the Bush policy involves cutting taxes on high incomes, especially on the income wealthy Americans receive from capital gains and dividends. You might say that the Bush administration favors people who live off their wealth over people who have a job. But there are some middle-class "sweeteners" thrown in, so the administration can point to a few ordinary American families who have received significant tax cuts.

Furthermore, the administration has engaged in a systematic campaign of disinformation about whose taxes have been cut. Indeed, one of Bush's first actions after taking office was to tell the Treasury Department to stop producing estimates of how tax cuts are distributed by income class -- that is, information on who gained how much. Instead, official reports on taxes under Bush are textbook examples of how to mislead with statistics, presenting a welter of confusing numbers that convey the false impression that the tax cuts favor middle-class families, not the wealthy.

In reality, only a few middle-class families received a significant tax cut under Bush. But every wealthy American -- especially those who live off of stock earnings or their inheritance -- got a big tax cut. To picture who gained the most, imagine the son of a very wealthy man, who expects to inherit $50 million in stock and live off the dividends. Before the Bush tax cuts, our lucky heir-to-be would have paid about $27 million in estate taxes and contributed 39.6 percent of his dividend income in taxes. Once Bush's cuts go into effect, he could inherit the whole estate tax-free and pay a tax rate of only fifteen percent on his stock earnings. Truly, this is a very good time to be one of the have mores.

It's worth noting that Bush doesn't simply favor the upper class: It's the upper-upper class he cares about. That became clear last fall, when the House and Senate passed rival tax-cutting bills. (What were they doing cutting taxes yet again in the face of a huge budget deficit and an expensive war? Never mind.) The Senate bill was devoted to providing relief to middle-class wage earners: According to the Tax Policy Center, two-thirds of the Senate tax cut would have gone to people with incomes of between $100,000 and $500,000 a year. Those making more than $1 million a year would have received only eight percent of the cut.

The House bill, by contrast, focused on extending tax cuts on capital gains and dividends. More than forty percent of the House cuts would have flowed to the $1 million-plus group; only thirty percent to the 100K to 500K taxpayers.

The White House favored the House bill -- and the final, reconciled measure wound up awarding a quarter of the benefits to America's millionaires. That, in a nutshell, is the politics of income inequality under Bush.

Oh, one last thing: What about the claim that the Bush tax cuts did wonders for economic growth? In fact, job creation has been much slower under Bush than under Clinton, and overall growth since 2003 is largely the result of the huge housing boom, which has more to do with low interest rates than with taxes. But the biggest irony of all is that the real boom -- the one in the 1990s -- followed tax changes that were the reverse of Bush's policies. Clinton raised taxes on the rich, and the economy prospered.

A generation ago the distribution of income in the United States didn't look all that different from that of other advanced countries. We had more poverty, largely because of the unresolved legacy of slavery. But the gap between the economic elite and the middle class was no larger in America than it was in Europe.

Today, we're completely out of line with other advanced countries. The share of income received by the top 0.1 percent of Americans is twice the share received by the corresponding group in Britain, and three times the share in France. These days, to find societies as unequal as the United States you have to look beyond the advanced world, to Latin America. And if that comparison doesn't frighten you, it should.

The social and economic failure of Latin America is one of history's great tragedies. Our southern neighbors started out with natural and human resources at least as favorable for economic development as those in the United States. Yet over the course of the past two centuries, they fell steadily behind. Economic historians such as Kenneth Sokoloff of UCLA think they know why: Latin America got caught in an inequality trap. For historical reasons -- the kind of crops they grew, the elitist policies of colonial Spain -- Latin American societies started out with much more inequality than the societies of North America. But this inequality persisted, Sokoloff writes, because elites were able to "institutionalize an unequal distribution of political power" and to "use that greater influence to establish rules, laws and other government policies that advantaged members of the elite relative to non-members." Rather than making land available to small farmers, as the United States did with the Homestead Act, Latin American governments tended to give large blocks of public lands to people with the right connections. They also shortchanged basic education -- condemning millions to illiteracy. The result, Sokoloff notes, was "persistence over time of the high degree of inequality." This sharp inequality, in turn, doomed the economies of Latin America: Many talented people never got a chance to rise to their full potential, simply because they were born into the wrong class.

In addition, the statistical evidence shows, unequal societies tend to be corrupt societies. When there are huge disparities in wealth, the rich have both the motive and the means to corrupt the system on their behalf. In The New Industrial State, published in 1967, John Kenneth Galbraith dismissed any concern that corporate executives might exploit their position for personal gain, insisting that group decision-making would enforce "a high standard of personal honesty." But in recent years, the sheer amount of money paid to executives who are perceived as successful has overridden the restraints that Galbraith believed would control executive greed. Today, a top executive who pumps up his company's stock price by faking high profits can walk away with vast wealth even if the company later collapses, and the small chance he faces of going to jail isn't an effective deterrent. What's more, the group decision-making that Galbraith thought would prevent personal corruption doesn't work if everyone in the group can be bought off with a piece of the spoils -- which is more or less what happened at Enron. It is also what happens in Congress, when corporations share the spoils with our elected representatives in the form of generous campaign contributions and lucrative lobbying jobs.

As the past six years demonstrate, such political corruption only worsens as economic inequality rises. Indeed, the gap between rich and poor doesn't just mean that few Americans share in the benefits of economic growth -- it also undermines the sense of shared experience that binds us together as a nation. "Trust is based upon the belief that we are all in this together, part of a 'moral community,' " writes Eric Uslaner, a political scientist at the University of Maryland who has studied the effects of inequality on trust. "It is tough to convince people in a highly stratified society that the rich and the poor share common values, much less a common fate."

In the end, the effects of our growing economic inequality go far beyond dollars and cents. This, ultimately, is the most pressing question we face as a society today: Will the United States go down the path that Latin America followed -- one that leads to ever-growing disparity in political power as well as in income? The United States doesn't have Third World levels of economic inequality -- yet. But it is not hard to foresee, in the current state of our political and economic scene, the outline of a transformation into a permanently unequal society -- one that locks in and perpetuates the drastic economic polarization that is already dangerously far advanced.

Keeping Score

2006-12-07T20:31:00.000-08:00

Shortly after U.S. forces marched into Baghdad in 2003, The Weekly Standard published a jeering article titled, “The Cassandra Chronicles: The stupidity of the antiwar doomsayers.” Among those the article mocked was a “war novelist” named James Webb, who is now the senator-elect from Virginia.

The article’s title was more revealing than its authors knew. People forget the nature of Cassandra’s curse: although nobody would believe her, all her prophecies came true.

And so it was with those who warned against invading Iraq. At best, they were ignored. A recent article in The Washington Post ruefully conceded that the paper’s account of the debate in the House of Representatives over the resolution authorizing the Iraq war — a resolution opposed by a majority of the Democrats — gave no coverage at all to those antiwar arguments that now seem prescient.

At worst, those who were skeptical about the case for war had their patriotism and/or their sanity questioned. The New Republic now says that it “deeply regrets its early support for this war.” Does it also deeply regret accusing those who opposed rushing into war of “abject pacifism?”

Now, only a few neocon dead-enders still believe that this war was anything but a vast exercise in folly. And those who braved political pressure and ridicule to oppose what Al Gore has rightly called “the worst strategic mistake in the history of the United States” deserve some credit.

Unlike The Weekly Standard, which singled out those it thought had been proved wrong, I’d like to offer some praise to those who got it right. Here’s a partial honor roll:

Former President George H. W. Bush and Brent Scowcroft, explaining in 1998 why they didn’t go on to Baghdad in 1991: “Had we gone the invasion route, the United States could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land.”

Representative Ike Skelton, September 2002: “I have no doubt that our military would decisively defeat Iraq’s forces and remove Saddam. But like the proverbial dog chasing the car down the road, we must consider what we would do after we caught it.”

Al Gore, September 2002: “I am deeply concerned that the course of action that we are presently embarking upon with respect to Iraq has the potential to seriously damage our ability to win the war against terrorism and to weaken our ability to lead the world in this new century.”

Barack Obama, now a United States senator, September 2002: “I don’t oppose all wars. What I am opposed to is a dumb war. What I am opposed to is a rash war. What I am opposed to is the cynical attempt by Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz and other armchair, weekend warriors in this administration to shove their own ideological agendas down our throats, irrespective of the costs in lives lost and in hardships borne.”

Representative John Spratt, October 2002: “The outcome after the conflict is actually going to be the hardest part, and it is far less certain.”

Representative Nancy Pelosi, now the House speaker-elect, October 2002: “When we go in, the occupation, which is now being called the liberation, could be interminable and the amount of money it costs could be unlimited.”

Senator Russ Feingold, October 2002: “I am increasingly troubled by the seemingly shifting justifications for an invasion at this time. ... When the administration moves back and forth from one argument to another, I think it undercuts the credibility of the case and the belief in its urgency. I believe that this practice of shifting justifications has much to do with the troubling phenomenon of many Americans questioning the administration’s motives.”

Howard Dean, then a candidate for president and now the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, February 2003: “I firmly believe that the president is focusing our diplomats, our military, our intelligence agencies, and even our people on the wrong war, at the wrong time. ... Iraq is a divided country, with Sunni, Shia and Kurdish factions that share both bitter rivalries and access to large quantities of arms.”

We should honor these people for their wisdom and courage. We should also ask why anyone who didn’t raise questions about the war — or, at any rate, anyone who acted as a cheerleader for this march of folly — should be taken seriously when he or she talks about matters of national security.

How to make a middle class

2006-12-03T23:12:00.000-08:00

Over the last 20 years, the United States has regressed into what one economist calls a "plutonomy" — a society in which the largest economic gains flow to an ever smaller portion of the population. According to recent economic statistics, from 1999 to 2004, the inflation-adjusted income of the bottom 90% of all U.S. households grew by 2%, compared with a 57% jump for the richest 10%. Incomes rose by more than 87% for households annually making $1 million and more than doubled for those that take home about $20 million a year.

Most disturbingly, workers losing the most economic ground are not the uneducated and unskilled but those with high school, community college and even four-year degrees. Overall, the middle class, in relative if not absolute terms, has lost purchasing power, especially in big coastal cities where the highest earners and the super-rich have driven up prices for housing and the cost of living. Globalization and automation have not only hurt manufacturing workers but also mid-level managers, engineers and software programmers. Despite enormous media and stock market hype, for instance, the U.S. has lost more than 700,000 information industry jobs since early 2001.

Is there any way to restore the prospects of middle- and working-class Americans? A comprehensive program to rebuild the nation's highways and bridges, upgrade its ports, construct and expand its energy lifelines and enlarge its public transportation systems could generate hundreds of thousands of good-paying jobs. Admittedly, this back-to-basics strategy is not glamorous. But it has helped narrow economic inequality in the past by producing more balanced economic growth.

During the 1930s, for instance, the government sought to narrow the enormous wealth disparities caused by the Depression by putting people to work on an unprecedented number of infrastructure improvements. About 3 million workers, many of them unemployed, were organized to build roads, bridges and dams. They planted millions of trees in middle America to prevent soil erosion. They built transportation networks that helped cities increase their industrial productivity. Rural electrification programs lifted sections of the Midwest and South out of darkness.

In the 1950s, under the Eisenhower administration, construction began on an interstate highway system that, when completed, reduced travel times and made the economy more efficient. By promoting suburban development, the new roads also sparked an unprecedented growth in homeownership for working- and middle-class families.

The result was one of the most balanced periods of prosperity in U.S. history. As ordinary Americans prospered, the share of the nation's wealth controlled by the top 10% of the population fell from nearly 50% in the 1930s to about 30% in the 1960s. Yes, the super-rich did quite well. But coupled with such government programs as the GI Bill and housing for veterans, the infrastructure projects helped give more Americans access to higher education and homeownership.

Both Democrats and Republicans have largely abandoned policies that led to balanced economic expansion. Liberals tend to favor social programs that redistribute income to the less privileged, while conservatives resist nonmilitary spending. As a result, since the mid-1960s, spending on public infrastructure has fallen from more than 3% of gross domestic product to about 2.5%. As the quality of roads, bridges, schools, sanitation and healthcare fell, wealth shifted away from the middle and working classes. Measures of income inequality skyrocketed from relatively low levels in the 1950-1970 period to postwar highs in the late 1990s.

Of course, lack of infrastructure spending was not the only culprit. But minimal investment in public projects that boost the economy's productivity certainly has not helped. By contrast, countries such as China, Japan, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan have poured billions of dollars into upgrading airports, transit systems, schools and roads, and their economies have benefited.

The scale of today's economic inequality in the U.S. can be eye-popping. Since 1980, for instance, Manhattan's inequality rate has risen from 17th to first among all U.S. counties. The richest 20% in the borough now earns 52 times what the lowest fifth does, a disparity roughly comparable with Namibia. Last month, just as Wall Street hailed record bonuses of more than $25 billion, thousands of New Yorkers lined up for 185 jobs — 65 of them full time — at the M&M's World theme store in Times Square. The starting salary was $10.75 an hour, though the benefits package was generous by comparison with most entry-level jobs.

Similar wealth concentration is occurring throughout the country. California is home to one of the world's highest number of billionaires and multimillionaires, but one in five children live in poverty here. A 2000 study by the California legislative analyst's office showed that 20% of San Francisco's population took home more than 60% of the Bay Area's income, the worst inequality in the state. In Los Angeles County, 20% of the population pocketed about 55% of the region's income.

The current favored policy proposals will do little to change economic disparity. The Republican package of high-end tax cuts, pork-barrel spending projects such as the bridge to nowhere in Alaska and near-total neglect of the country's industrial base by generally ignoring unfair trade practices constitutes a veritable formula for continued inequality. That's one reason why the party lost power in the November midterm elections despite overall solid economic growth and a record-breaking stock market.

Democrats also have few answers. Many focus on increasing the U.S. minimum wage or expanding the "living wage" movement that has taken hold in Los Angeles and San Francisco. But the chief beneficiaries of these policies are younger part-time workers, not primary household wage-earners. One study by the Public Policy Institute of California shows that such measures, while boosting the wages of those affected by them, also reduce overall regional employment by as much as 6% to 8% among lower-skilled workers.

Others push for higher taxes on the "rich," a strategy that would have little effect on multimillionaires and billionaires, who can afford legal and financial advisors who protect their wealth. Most Democrats don't want to restrict wealthy people's use of private environmental trusts or activist foundations to dodge taxes because many of these entities are among their most fervent supporters. Instead, it's those in the $100,000-to-$300,000-a-year range who would feel the pinch of higher taxes, many of whom are small-business owners and professionals who create jobs in costly urban areas.

Indeed, the net result of decades of liberal urban policy — mixed-price residential developments, high taxes on professionals and small businesses, environmental and business regulation and mandated wage rates — has been to drive more and more middle-class workers out of urban areas. A recent Brookings Institution report showed that heavily Democratic regions such as Boston, Los Angeles, New York and San Francisco are precisely the places where middle-class neighborhoods are most endangered.

The best way to reverse these trends is to return to those policies that produced a vibrant, economically well-balanced society: creating jobs by investing in infrastructure and promoting people's technical skills. According to the American Society of Civil Engineers, $1.6 trillion worth of infrastructure projects are required but yet to be started.

Thousands of production jobs go begging in this nation not because of foreign competition but because of a lack of skilled workers willing or able to obtain basic machinery training. As one Houston factory manager, echoing findings across the country, remarked recently, it is easier to find an engineer than an experienced machinist or welder.

To be sure, a back-to-basics economic growth strategy would conflict with certain deeply held but flawed political nostrums. Most Republicans would resist any notion that government should have a larger role in promoting the aspirations of Americans, although precisely this belief animated the Eisenhower administration's interstate highway system. Many upscale liberals probably would be hesitant to embrace a full-blown program to rebuild the infrastructure because of its possibly harmful effects on the environment. Others claim that training for "knowledge" jobs should take precedence over that for manufacturing or trade occupations.

All of the essentials — capital, a willingness to work and a undeniable need to rebuild our infrastructure and expand worker skills — for a program that would directly address our steadily worsening class divide are already in place. All we lack now is the political willingness to embrace this opportunity.

Single Payer Health Care

2006-12-01T15:43:00.000-08:00

In discussing this issue, the most important piece of information to hold on to, is this:

EVERY OTHER DEVELOPED COUNTRY IN THE WORLD,
ALL THE OTHER WESTERN CAPITALIST DEMOCRACIES
EVERY SINGLE ONE

...has SOME form of universal health coverage for their citizens. Only the United States does not.

They differ from each other in how they do this, and the mechanisms and details do matter... Canada is different from the U.K., is different from France is different from Germany, Japan, Austalia, Taiwan, etc... But only the United States does not have something. Remember that whenever somebody says, "yes... but..

An Overview Introduction to What We Mean By Single Payer

Single-payer national health insurance is a system in which a single public or quasi-public agency organizes health financing, but delivery of care remains largely private.

Currently, the U.S. health care system is outrageously expensive, yet inadequate. Despite spending more than twice as much as the rest of the industrialized nations ($7,129 per capita), the United States performs poorly in comparison on major health indicators such as life expectancy, infant mortality and immunization rates. Moreover, the other advanced nations provide comprehensive coverage to their entire populations, while the U.S. leaves 46 million completely uninsured and millions more inadequately covered.

The reason we spend more and get less than the rest of the world is because we have a patchwork system of for-profit payers. Private insurers necessarily waste health dollars on things that have nothing to do with care: overhead, underwriting, billing, sales and marketing departments as well as huge profits and exorbitant executive pay. Doctors and hospitals must maintain costly administrative staffs to deal with the bureaucracy. Combined, this needless administration consumes one-third (31 percent) of Americans’ health dollars.

Single-payer financing is the only way to recapture this wasted money. The potential savings on paperwork, more than $350 billion per year, are enough to provide comprehensive coverage to everyone without paying any more than we already do.

Under a single-payer system, all Americans would be covered for all medically necessary services, including: doctor, hospital, long-term care, mental health, dental vision, prescription drug and medical supply costs. Patients would regain free choice of doctor and hospital, and doctors would regain autonomy over patient care.

Physicians would be paid fee-for-service according to a negotiated formulary or receive salary from a hospital or nonprofit HMO / group practice. Hospitals would receive a global budget for operating expenses. Health facilities and expensive equipment purchases would be managed by regional health planning boards.

A single-payer system would be financed by eliminating private insurers and recapturing their administrative waste. Modest new taxes would replace premiums and out-of-pocket payments currently paid by individuals and business. Costs would be controlled though negotiated fees, global budgeting and bulk purchasing.

(Most of the above material comes, with permission, from an organization called Physisicans for a National Health Program, a single issue organization advocating a universal, comprehensive single-payer national health program. PNHP has more than 14,000 members and chapters across the United States.)

Jim Webb and democratic populism

2006-11-16T13:30:00.000-08:00

The most important--and unfortunately the least debated--issue in politics today is our society's steady drift toward a class-based system, the likes of which we have not seen since the 19th century. America's top tier has grown infinitely richer and more removed over the past 25 years. It is not unfair to say that they are literally living in a different country. Few among them send their children to public schools; fewer still send their loved ones to fight our wars. They own most of our stocks, making the stock market an unreliable indicator of the economic health of working people. The top 1% now takes in an astounding 16% of national income, up from 8% in 1980. The tax codes protect them, just as they protect corporate America, through a vast system of loopholes.

Incestuous corporate boards regularly approve compensation packages for chief executives and others that are out of logic's range. As this newspaper has reported, the average CEO of a sizeable corporation makes more than $10 million a year, while the minimum wage for workers amounts to about $10,000 a year, and has not been raised in nearly a decade. When I graduated from college in the 1960s, the average CEO made 20 times what the average worker made. Today, that CEO makes 400 times as much.

In the age of globalization and outsourcing, and with a vast underground labor pool from illegal immigration, the average American worker is seeing a different life and a troubling future. Trickle-down economics didn't happen. Despite the vaunted all-time highs of the stock market, wages and salaries are at all-time lows as a percentage of the national wealth. At the same time, medical costs have risen 73% in the last six years alone. Half of that increase comes from wage-earners' pockets rather than from insurance, and 47 million Americans have no medical insurance at all.

Manufacturing jobs are disappearing. Many earned pension programs have collapsed in the wake of corporate "reorganization." And workers' ability to negotiate their futures has been eviscerated by the twin threats of modern corporate America: If they complain too loudly, their jobs might either be outsourced overseas or given to illegal immigrants.

This ever-widening divide is too often ignored or downplayed by its beneficiaries. A sense of entitlement has set in among elites, bordering on hubris. When I raised this issue with corporate leaders during the recent political campaign, I was met repeatedly with denials, and, from some, an overt lack of concern for those who are falling behind. A troubling arrogance is in the air among the nation's most fortunate. Some shrug off large-scale economic and social dislocations as the inevitable byproducts of the "rough road of capitalism." Others claim that it's the fault of the worker or the public education system, that the average American is simply not up to the international challenge, that our education system fails us, or that our workers have become spoiled by old notions of corporate paternalism.

Still others have gone so far as to argue that these divisions are the natural results of a competitive society. Furthermore, an unspoken insinuation seems to be inundating our national debate: Certain immigrant groups have the "right genetics" and thus are natural entrants to the "overclass," while others, as well as those who come from stock that has been here for 200 years and have not made it to the top, simply don't possess the necessary attributes.

Most Americans reject such notions. But the true challenge is for everyone to understand that the current economic divisions in society are harmful to our future. It should be the first order of business for the new Congress to begin addressing these divisions, and to work to bring true fairness back to economic life. Workers already understand this, as they see stagnant wages and disappearing jobs.

America's elites need to understand this reality in terms of their own self-interest. A recent survey in the Economist warned that globalization was affecting the U.S. differently than other "First World" nations, and that white-collar jobs were in as much danger as the blue-collar positions which have thus far been ravaged by outsourcing and illegal immigration. That survey then warned that "unless a solution is found to sluggish real wages and rising inequality, there is a serious risk of a protectionist backlash" in America that would take us away from what they view to be the "biggest economic stimulus in world history."

More troubling is this: If it remains unchecked, this bifurcation of opportunities and advantages along class lines has the potential to bring a period of political unrest. Up to now, most American workers have simply been worried about their job prospects. Once they understand that there are (and were) clear alternatives to the policies that have dislocated careers and altered futures, they will demand more accountability from the leaders who have failed to protect their interests. The "Wal-Marting" of cheap consumer products brought in from places like China, and the easy money from low-interest home mortgage refinancing, have softened the blows in recent years. But the balance point is tipping in both cases, away from the consumer and away from our national interest.

The politics of the Karl Rove era were designed to distract and divide the very people who would ordinarily be rebelling against the deterioration of their way of life. Working Americans have been repeatedly seduced at the polls by emotional issues such as the predictable mantra of "God, guns, gays, abortion and the flag" while their way of life shifted ineluctably beneath their feet. But this election cycle showed an electorate that intends to hold government leaders accountable for allowing every American a fair opportunity to succeed.

With this new Congress, and heading into an important presidential election in 2008, American workers have a chance to be heard in ways that have eluded them for more than a decade. Nothing is more important for the health of our society than to grant them the validity of their concerns. And our government leaders have no greater duty than to confront the growing unfairness in this age of globalization.

Mr. Webb is the Democratic senator-elect from Virginia.

(reprinted from www.opinionjournal.com)

DEMS TAKE SENATE!!!!

2006-11-08T18:22:00.000-08:00

The long national nightmare is over.
Democrats wrested control of the Senate from Republicans Wednesday with an upset victory in Virginia, giving the party complete domination of Capitol Hill for the first time since 1994.The tide is now so against Allen, I think he concedes later tonight. Everyone is turning against him.

Okay, the AP story has been updated, there's more now:

The Associated Press contacted election officials in all 134 localities where voting occurred, obtaining updated numbers Wednesday. About half the localities said they had completed their postelection canvassing and nearly all had counted outstanding absentees. Most were expected to be finished by Friday.

The new AP count showed Webb with 1,172,538 votes and Allen with 1,165,302, a difference of 7,236. Virginia has had two statewide vote recounts in modern history, but both resulted in vote changes of no more than a few hundred votes.

An adviser to Allen, speaking on condition of anonymity because his boss had not formally decided to end the campaign, said the senator wanted to wait until most of canvassing was completed before announcing his decision, possibly as early as Thursday evening.

The adviser said that Allen was disinclined to request a recount if the final vote spread was similar to that of election night.

we're baa-ack!!!

2006-11-08T08:40:00.000-08:00

Remembrance of Elections Past...

2006-11-06T22:33:00.000-08:00

It is considered tiresome to complain that the White House was stolen in 2000. In fact, the ultimate triumph of the George W. Bush forces in the 2000 dispute has been to stamp any discussion of that episode as bad sportsmanship and therefore, in a way, undemocratic itself. You lost fair and square: “Get over it,” as Justice Scalia advised.

Call me bitter: I am not over it and don’t want to be over it. I still find it shocking that democracy was so openly subverted, and even more shocking that so few others seem to share my shock. “Stolen”? That depends, as the man said, on what you mean by that word. Here is what I mean. First, a clear majority of those who voted in Florida intended to vote for Gore and walked out of the voting booth (or away from the mailbox) sincerely believing that they had done so. Vindicating the assumptions of those who did vote about whom they voted for (a standard first suggested, as far as I know, by Jacob Weisberg of Slate) seems about the least you can demand of a voting system, and Florida failed this test.

Second, at every stage, Republican government officials thwarted all attempts to let democracy work in the minimal sense of the previous paragraph. Repeatedly, they interpreted the “discretion” that any public official must have as a license to produce the result they wanted, rather than as creating any obligation to do what is right. The Florida recount debate was a festival of intellectual dishonesty. On a whole series of technical issues (those butterfly ballots mispunched by the confused old ladies of Palm Beach, or military absentee ballots mailed after the deadline) there were plausible arguments on both sides. And these arguments had no obvious ideological cast. There is no natural conservative or liberal position on the dilemma of the dangling chad. So it is remarkable — amusing, depressing, not surprising I guess — how quickly and passionately Democrats and Republicans staked out their respective cui bono positions. But Republicans controlled the state and federal governments, so they got their way.

The Supreme Court’s ruling in Bush v. Gore was surprising. Shocking, in fact. Probably the most fatuous — i.e., knowingly stupid — Supreme Court decision in history. The justices of Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), who upheld racial segregation, could at least plead historical blinders. The majority justices of Bush v. Gore have no such excuse. Both as a raw assertion of judicial power and as a more specific interpretation of the 14th Amendment, it was not merely wrong, but spectacularly wrong in precisely the ways that conservative justices like Scalia, Rehnquist and Thomas had been objecting to for years. The justices invented a nonsensical equal-protection “right” — essentially, the right to an equal risk of having your vote miscounted — and held that any attempt to correct mistakes through a recount was unfair to those who didn’t get recounted. And then they declared this alleged right to be a one-time-only offer, like a grocery-store coupon. As Adam Cohen pointed out recently on the New York Times editorial page, the coupon has indeed expired. Bush v. Gore is rarely cited or applied in other situations.
(Michael Kinsley, NYT)
. . .

Quote of the day

2006-11-05T18:11:00.000-08:00

There may be little Americans can do to atone for this presidency, which will stain our country’s reputation for a long time. But the process of recovering our good name must begin somewhere, and the logical place is in the voting booth this Nov. 7. If we are fortunate, we can produce a result that is seen—in Washington, in Peoria, and in world capitals from Prague to Kuala Lumpur—as a repudiation of George W. Bush and the war of aggression he launched against Iraq.

-Pat Buchanan (The American Conservative)

Armed Forces: "Rumsfeld Must Go"

2006-11-03T21:53:00.000-08:00

Monday, an incredible rare joint editorial will run in the Army Times, the Air Force Times, and the Navy Times:

Time for Rumsfeld to go
"So long as our government requires the backing of an aroused and informed public opinion ... it is necessary to tell the hard bruising truth."
That statement was written by Pulitzer Prize-winning war correspondent Marguerite Higgins more than a half-century ago during the Korean War.
But until recently, the "hard bruising" truth about the Iraq war has been difficult to come by from leaders in Washington. One rosy reassurance after another has been handed down by President Bush, Vice President Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld: "mission accomplished," the insurgency is "in its last throes," and "back off," we know what we're doing, are a few choice examples.
Military leaders generally toed the line, although a few retired generals eventually spoke out from the safety of the sidelines, inciting criticism equally from anti-war types, who thought they should have spoken out while still in uniform, and pro-war foes, who thought the generals should have kept their critiques behind closed doors.
Now, however, a new chorus of criticism is beginning to resonate. Active-duty military leaders are starting to voice misgivings about the war's planning, execution and dimming prospects for success.
Army Gen. John Abizaid, chief of U.S. Central Command, told a Senate Armed Services Committee in September: "I believe that the sectarian violence is probably as bad as I've seen it ... and that if not stopped, it is possible that Iraq could move towards civil war."
Last week, someone leaked to The New York Times a Central Command briefing slide showing an assessment that the civil conflict in Iraq now borders on "critical" and has been sliding toward "chaos" for most of the past year. The strategy in Iraq has been to train an Iraqi army and police force that could gradually take over for U.S. troops in providing for the security of their new government and their nation.
But despite the best efforts of American trainers, the problem of molding a viciously sectarian population into anything resembling a force for national unity has become a losing proposition.
For two years, American sergeants, captains and majors training the Iraqis have told their bosses that Iraqi troops have no sense of national identity, are only in it for the money, don't show up for duty and cannot sustain themselves.
Meanwhile, colonels and generals have asked their bosses for more troops. Service chiefs have asked for more money.
And all along, Rumsfeld has assured us that things are well in hand.
Now, the president says he'll stick with Rumsfeld for the balance of his term in the White House.
This is a mistake.
It is one thing for the majority of Americans to think Rumsfeld has failed. But when the nation's current military leaders start to break publicly with their defense secretary, then it is clear that he is losing control of the institution he ostensibly leads.
These officers have been loyal public promoters of a war policy many privately feared would fail. They have kept their counsel private, adhering to more than two centuries of American tradition of subordination of the military to civilian authority.
And although that tradition, and the officers' deep sense of honor, prevent them from saying this publicly, more and more of them believe it.
Rumsfeld has lost credibility with the uniformed leadership, with the troops, with Congress and with the public at large. His strategy has failed, and his ability to lead is compromised. And although the blame for our failures in Iraq rests with the secretary, it will be the troops who bear its brunt.
This is not about the midterm elections. Regardless of which party wins Nov. 7, the time has come, Mr. President, to face the hard bruising truth:
Donald Rumsfeld must go.

Thank you, Keith Olberman

2006-11-01T21:45:00.000-08:00

MSNBC's Keith Olbermann, this evening. It's long. And some of the best writing I've ever read. C&L has the video and the transcript - here is the transcript:

And finally tonight, a Special Comment.

On the 22nd of May, 1856, as the deteriorating American political system veered towards the edge of the cliff, Congressman Preston Brooks of South Carolina, shuffled into the Senate of this nation, his leg stiff from an old dueling injury, supported by a cane. And he looked for the familiar figure of the prominent Senator from Massachusetts, Charles Sumner.

Brooks found Sumner at his desk, mailing out copies of a speech he had delivered three days earlier — a speech against slavery.

The Congressman matter-of-factly raised his walking stick in mid-air, and smashed its metal point, across the Senator's head.

Congressman Brooks hit his victim repeatedly. Senator Sumner somehow got to his feet and tried to flee. Brooks chased him, and delivered untold blows to Sumner's head. Even though Sumner lay unconscious and bleeding, on the Senate floor, Brooks finally stopped beating him, only because his cane finally broke.

Others will cite John Brown's attack on the arsenal at Harper's Ferry as the exact point after which the Civil War became inevitable.

In point of fact, it might have been the moment — not when Brooks broke his cane over the prostrate body of Senator Sumner - but when voters in Brooks's district started sending him new canes.

Tonight, we almost wonder to whom President Bush will send the next new cane.

There is tonight no political division in this country that he and his party will not exploit, nor have not exploited; no anxiety that he and his party will not inflame.

There is no line this President has not crossed — nor will not cross — to keep one political party, in power.

He has spread any and every fear among us, in a desperate effort to avoid that which he most fears — some check, some balance against what has become not an imperial, but a unilateral presidency.

And now it is evident that it no longer matters to him, whether that effort to avoid the judgment of the people, is subtle and nuanced — or laughably transparent.

Senator John Kerry called him out Monday.

He did it two years too late.

He had been too cordial — just as Vice President Gore had been too cordial in 2000 — just as millions of us, have been too cordial ever since.

Senator Kerry, as you well know, spoke at a college in Southern California. With bitter humor, he told the students that he had been in Texas the day before, that President Bush used to live in that state, but that now he lives in the state of denial.

He said the trip had reminded him about the value of education — that quote "if you make the most of it, you study hard, you do your homework, and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. If you don't, you can get stuck in Iraq."

The Senator, in essence, called Mr. Bush stupid.

The context was unmistakable: Texas;the state of denial;stuck in Iraq. No interpretation required.

And Mr. Bush and his minions responded, by appearing to be too stupid to realize that they had been called stupid.

They demanded Kerry apologize — to the troops in Iraq.

And so he now has.

That phrase "appearing to be too stupid" is used deliberately, Mr. Bush.

Because there are only three possibilities here:

One, sir, is that you are far more stupid than the worst of your critics have suggested; that you could not follow the construction of a simple sentence; that you could not recognize your own life story when it was deftly summarized; that you could not perceive it was the sad ledger of your presidency that was being recounted.

This, of course, compliments you, Mr. Bush, because even those who do not "make the most of it," who do not "study hard," who do not "do their homework," and who do not "make an effort to be smart" might still just be stupid — but honest.

No; the first option, sir, is, at best, improbable. You are not honest.

The second option is that you and those who work for you deliberately twisted what Senator Kerry said to fit your political template. That you decided to take advantage of it, to once again pretend that the attacks, solely about your own incompetence, were in fact attacks on the troops — or even on the nation itself.

The third possibility is, obviously, the nightmare scenario; that the first two options are in some way conflated.

That it is both politically convenient for you, and personally satisfying to you, to confuse yourself with the country for which, sir, you work.

A brief reminder, Mr. Bush: You are not the United States of America.

You are merely a politician whose entire legacy will have been a willingness to make anything political — to have, in this case, refused to acknowledge that the insult wasn't about the troops, and that the insult was not even truly about you either — that the insult, in fact, is you.

So now John Kerry has apologized to the troops; apologized for the Republicans' deliberate distortions.

Thus the President will now begin the apologies he owes our troops, right?

This President must apologize to the troops — for having suggested, six weeks ago, that the chaos in Iraq, the death and the carnage, the slaughtered Iraqi civilians and the dead American service personnel, will, to history, quote "look like just a comma."

This President must apologize to the troops — because the intelligence he claims led us into Iraq proved to be undeniably and irredeemably wrong.

This President must apologize to the troops — for having laughed about the failure of that intelligence, at a banquet, while our troops were in harm's way.

This President must apologize to the troops — because the streets of Iraq were not strewn with flowers and its residents did not greet them as liberators.

This President must apologize to the troops — because his administration ran out of "plan" after barely two months.

This President must apologize to the troops — for getting 2,815 of them killed.

This President must apologize to the troops — for getting this country into a war without a clue.

And Mr. Bush owes us an apology… for this destructive and omnivorous presidency.

Quote of the day

2006-10-04T19:51:00.000-07:00

A tyrant must put on the appearance of uncommon devotion to religion. Subjects are less apprehensive of illegal treatment from a ruler whom they consider god-fearing and pious. On the other hand, they do less easily move against him, believing that he has the gods on his side.
~~Aristotle

Bu$hies throw Condi under the bus

2006-10-02T18:30:00.000-07:00

This morning, Condi told the media traveling with her to the Middle East that she had no recollection of a meeting with George Tenet and Cofer Black on July 10th, 2001, as reported by Bob Woodward:

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said she cannot recall then-CIA chief George Tenet warning her of an impending al-Qaida attack in the United States, as a new book claims he did two months before the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.

“What I am quite certain of is that I would remember if I was told, as this account apparently says, that there was about to be an attack in the United States, and the idea that I would somehow have ignored that I find incomprehensible,” Rice said.

[snip]

“I don’t know that this meeting took place, but what I really don’t know, what I’m quite certain of, is that it was not a meeting in which I was told there was an impending attack and I refused to respond,” Rice said.

[snip]

Rice referred to the session as “the supposed meeting” and noted that it is not part of the independent Sept. 11 Commission’s report.

This afternoon, while she was overseas, someone in the White House threw Condi under the bus:

A review of White House records has determined that George J. Tenet, then the director of central intelligence, did indeed brief Condoleezza Rice and other top officials on July 10, 2001 about looming threat from Al Qaeda, a State Department spokesman said on Monday evening.

The account by the spokesman, Sean McCormack, came hours after Ms. Rice, the secretary of state, told reporters aboard her airplane that she did not recall such a meeting and said it was “incomprehensible” she ignored dire terrorist threats two months before the Sept. 11 attacks. Mr. McCormack also said the Bush administration had determined that the Sept. 11 commission had been briefed about the meeting, even though no mention of it appears in the commission’s report.

Except, the commissioners don’t remember being told anything about a special meeting on July 10th, 2001.

Ms. Rice told reporters aboard her plane on Sunday evening, as she began a trip to the Middle East, that she regarded that account as “simply ludicrous.” Mr. McCormack, in confirming later that the meeting had taken place, said that the White House review had found that Ms. Rice had asked Mr. Tenet to provide the same briefing to Donald H. Rumsfeld, the defense secretary, and John Ashcroft, the attorney general. Among those who attended the meting, Mr. McCormack said, was Stephen Hadley, then the deputy national security adviser.

So she doesn’t remember a meeting in which her Number Two was in attendance and where she in fact asked Tenet to say the same things again to Rummy and Ashcroft?

Who in the White House pulled the records to prove Condi a liar today? And how much fun did Cheney and Rumsfeld have in doing it?

Quote of the day: I think I have seen everything...

2006-10-02T00:28:00.000-07:00

In my 61 years on this planet, I thought I had seen most things.

I
have been married and divorced. I have children and have seen a child
die. I have grandchildren and have seen a grandchild die. I watched my
Mother suffer with Multiple Sclerosis, Alzheimer’s disease and dementia
for years before passing away in 2005.

I have spent 16 miserable days on a troopship from Oakland, California to Da Nang, Viet Nam.

I witnessed Tet of 1968 up close and personal.

In April 1970, I was in a forward base camp 100 meters inside the Cambodian border.

I
have learned to fly a helicopter, shoot a 4.2 mortar, repair teletype
machines, high frequency and tactical radios, land mine detectors and
pretty much everything in between.

I have teed off a round of golf at midnight in Tronheim, Norway.

I was at the 1972 Olympics in Munich when the unthinkable happened.

Today
I have been listening to the Senate debate about redefining Common
Article Three of the Geneva Convention and revocation of habeas corpus.
I have watched Senators argue that secret trials and secret evidence is
good.

Today our values may be time warped to pre-1215 values.

I just can’t get my brain around what is being done to our dignity today. I can truthfully say I think I have seen everything.

Something is really, really wrong here.

2006-10-01T03:44:00.000-07:00

Heckuva job Bushie

2006-09-23T18:05:00.000-07:00

A stark assessment of terrorism trends by American intelligence agencies has found that the American invasion and occupation of Iraq has helped spawn a new generation of Islamic radicalism and that the overall terrorist threat has grown since the Sept. 11 attacks.

The classified National Intelligence Estimate attributes a more direct role to the Iraq war in fueling radicalism than that presented either in recent White House documents or in a report released Wednesday by the House Intelligence Committee, according to several officials in Washington involved in preparing the assessment or who have read the final document.

The intelligence estimate, completed in April, is the first formal appraisal of global terrorism by United States intelligence agencies since the Iraq war began, and represents a consensus view of the 16 disparate spy services inside government. Titled “Trends in Global Terrorism: Implications for the United States,’’ it asserts that Islamic radicalism, rather than being in retreat, has metastasized and spread across the globe.

An opening section of the report, “Indicators of the Spread of the Global Jihadist Movement,” cites the Iraq war as a reason for the diffusion of jihad ideology.

The report “says that the Iraq war has made the overall terrorism problem worse,” said one American intelligence official.

More than a dozen United States government officials and outside experts were interviewed for this article, and all spoke only on condition of anonymity because they were discussing a classified intelligence document. The officials included employees of several government agencies, and both supporters and critics of the Bush administration. All of those interviewed had either seen the final version of the document or participated in the creation of earlier drafts. These officials discussed some of the document’s general conclusions but not details, which remain highly classified.

Officials with knowledge of the intelligence estimate said it avoided specific judgments about the likelihood that terrorists would once again strike on United States soil. The relationship between the Iraq war and terrorism, and the question of whether the United States is safer, have been subjects of persistent debate since the war began in 2003.

National Intelligence Estimates are the most authoritative documents that the intelligence community produces on a specific national security issue, and are approved by John D. Negroponte, director of national intelligence. Their conclusions are based on analysis of raw intelligence collected by all of the spy agencies.

Analysts began working on the estimate in 2004, but it was not finalized until this year. Part of the reason was that some government officials were unhappy with the structure and focus of earlier versions of the document, according to officials involved in the discussion.

Previous drafts described actions by the United States government that were determined to have stoked the jihad movement, like the indefinite detention of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay and the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal, and some policy makers argued that the intelligence estimate should be more focused on specific steps to mitigate the terror threat. It is unclear whether the final draft of the intelligence estimate criticizes individual policies of the United States, but intelligence officials involved in preparing the document said its conclusions were not softened or massaged for political purposes.

Frederick Jones, a White House spokesman, said the White House “played no role in drafting or reviewing the judgments expressed in the National Intelligence Estimate on terrorism.” The estimate’s judgments confirm some predictions of a National Intelligence Council report completed in January 2003, two months before the Iraq invasion. That report stated that the approaching war had the potential to increase support for political Islam worldwide and could increase support for some terrorist objectives.

Documents released by the White House timed to coincide with the fifth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks emphasized the successes that the United States had made in dismantling the top tier of Al Qaeda.

“Since the Sept. 11 attacks, America and its allies are safer, but we are not yet safe,” concludes one, a report titled “9/11 Five Years Later: Success and Challenges.” “We have done much to degrade Al Qaeda and its affiliates and to undercut the perceived legitimacy of terrorism.”

That document makes only passing mention of the impact the Iraq war has had on the global jihad movement. “The ongoing fight for freedom in Iraq has been twisted by terrorist propaganda as a rallying cry,” it states.

The report mentions the possibility that Islamic militants who fought in Iraq could return to their home countries, “exacerbating domestic conflicts or fomenting radical ideologies.”

On Wednesday, the Republican-controlled House Intelligence Committee released a more ominous report about the terrorist threat. That assessment, based entirely on unclassified documents, details a growing jihad movement and says, “Al Qaeda leaders wait patiently for the right opportunity to attack.”

The new National Intelligence Estimate was overseen by David B. Low, the national intelligence officer for transnational threats, who commissioned it in 2004 after he took up his post at the National Intelligence Council. Mr. Low declined to be interviewed for this article.

The estimate concludes that the radical Islamic movement has expanded from a core of Qaeda operatives and affiliated groups to include a new class of “self-generating” cells inspired by Al Qaeda’s leadership but without any direct connection to Osama bin Laden or his top lieutenants.

It also examines how the Internet has helped spread jihadist ideology, and how cyberspace has become a haven for terrorist operatives who no longer have geographical refuges in countries like Afghanistan.

In early 2005, the National Intelligence Council released a study concluding that Iraq had become the primary training ground for the next generation of terrorists, and that veterans of the Iraq war might ultimately overtake Al Qaeda’s current leadership in the constellation of the global jihad leadership.

But the new intelligence estimate is the first report since the war began to present a comprehensive picture about the trends in global terrorism.

In recent months, some senior American intelligence officials have offered glimpses into the estimate’s conclusions in public speeches.

“New jihadist networks and cells, sometimes united by little more than their anti-Western agendas, are increasingly likely to emerge,” said Gen. Michael V. Hayden, during a speech in San Antonio in April, the month that the new estimate was completed. “If this trend continues, threats to the U.S. at home and abroad will become more diverse and that could lead to increasing attacks worldwide,” said the general, who was then Mr. Negroponte’s top deputy and is now director of the Central Intelligence Agency.

For more than two years, there has been tension between the Bush administration and American spy agencies over the violence in Iraq and the prospects for a stable democracy in the country. Some intelligence officials have said the White House has consistently presented a more optimistic picture of the situation in Iraq than justified by intelligence reports from the field.

Spy agencies usually produce several national intelligence estimates each year on a variety of subjects. The most controversial of these in recent years was an October 2002 document assessing Iraq’s illicit weapons programs. Several government investigations have discredited that report, and the intelligence community is overhauling how it analyzes data, largely as a result of those investigations.

The broad judgments of the new intelligence estimate are consistent with assessments of global terrorist threats by American allies and independent terrorism experts.

The panel investigating the London terrorist bombings of July 2005 reported in May that the leaders of Britain’s domestic and international intelligence services, MI5 and MI6, “emphasized to the committee the growing scale of the Islamist terrorist threat.”

More recently, the Council on Global Terrorism, an independent research group of respected terrorism experts, assigned a grade of “D+” to United States efforts over the past five years to combat Islamic extremism. The council concluded that “there is every sign that radicalization in the Muslim world is spreading rather than shrinking.”

How Bu$hco has run the economy into the ground

2006-09-18T10:22:00.000-07:00

The Bush administration has been a nightmare for fiscal conservatives. Bush inherited a great fiscal situation - a budget surplus and slowing growth of total debt outstanding. However, Bush refused to continue the trend, instead opting to return to the reckless and discredited fiscal policies of Reagan. As a result, the US federal situation is far worse now than it was six years ago. In other words, fiscal conservatives have every reason to be angry with the last six years of Republican leadership."

First, and perhaps most importantly, this graph highlights the last 40 years of US debt growth.

Let the graph sink in for a minute because it explains a very simple truth: over the last 25 years, Democrats have a proven track record of handling the nation's finances with maturity. The Republicans have a track record of handling the nation's finances with pure recklessness.

Despite claims to the contrary, the Bush administration has demonstrated they don't have any control of the deficit. Consider the following information from The Bureau of Public Debt:

In 2002, total debt outstanding increased from $5.807 trillion to $6.228 trillion, or $421 billion.

In 2003, total debt outstanding increased from $6.228 trillion to $6.783 trillion, or $555 billion.

In 2004, total debt outstanding increased from $6.783 trillion to $7.379 trillion, or $596 billion.

In 2005, yet total debt outstanding increased from $7.379 trillion to $7.932 trillion or $553 billion.

So far in 2006, total debt outstanding has increased from $7.932 to $8.527 trillion, or $595 billion.

Despite the administration's claims they will halve the budget deficit by 2008, the Treasury continues to issue over $550 billion dollars of net new debt every year. That means the deficit is not under control in any way.

The primary reason for this continual issuing a large amount of debt is simple: government expenditures have increased far faster than government revenues. According to the Congressional Budget Office government revenues were 19.8% of GDP in 2001 and 17.5% in 2005. Over the same period, government expenditures increased from 18.5% to 20.1%. The primary drop in government receipts occurred in individual income taxes, which were $994 (9.9% of GDP) billion in 2001 and $927 (7.5% of GDP) billion in 2005. Over the same period, discretionary spending increased from $649 (6.5% of GDP) billion to $967 billion (7.9% of GDP).

The numbers above are simple: Bush's policies have returned the US to the Reagan policy of deficit spending. That means Bush's tax cuts are in fact tax deferrals; at some time the US will have to pay for the debt it has issued. In essence, we are borrowing today hoping for a growth rate high enough to pay for the debt we have issued. However, Bush's growth rate is on par with the last 25 years of growth. That means we're not getting more bang for the buck. Instead, we are getting one big fiscal headache.

Ann Richards, RIP

2006-09-13T21:25:00.000-07:00

God bless you Ann Richards, you were one of a kind, and a more genuine person than George W. Bush will ever be. May you rest in peace, while the rest of us fight nausea at the thought that Bush or someone else from the Texas crime family will attend your funeral out of some phony respect for you and your accomplishments.

Keith Olberman's K-O

2006-09-12T13:05:00.000-07:00

Keith Olberman had a blistering 9/11 commentary on MSNBC (here's the video ):

"Terrorists did not come and steal our newly-regained sense of being American first, and political, fiftieth. Nor did the Democrats. Nor did the media. Nor did the people.

"The President -- and those around him -- did that.

"They promised bi-partisanship, and then showed that to them, 'bi-partisanship' meant that their party would rule and the rest would have to follow, or be branded, with ever-escalating hysteria, as morally or intellectually confused, as appeasers, as those who, in the Vice President's words yesterday, 'validate the strategy of the terrorists.' . . .

"The polite phrase for how so many of us were duped into supporting a war, on the false premise that it had 'something to do' with 9/11 is 'lying by implication.'

"The impolite phrase is 'impeachable offense.'"

Whither America?

2006-09-11T22:09:00.000-07:00

If you had told me, five years ago, that on the fifth anniversary of the worst terrorist attack in history Ground Zero would still be nothing but an enormous hole in the ground, I wouldn't have believed you -- just as I wouldn't have believed that a major American city could be thoroughly trashed by a Category 4 hurricane and then left to moulder in the mud for a year while various federal, state and local bureaucrats and hack politicians tried to make up their minds what to do.

I would have said that while those kinds of things can and do happen in Third World kleptocracies or decaying Stalinist police states, they're simply not possible in the richest and most powerful nation in history. Even if the voters could somehow be bamboozled into accepting such incompetence, the wealthy elites and corporate technocrats who own and operate the world's only remaining superpower would never stand for it.

You can learn a lot about a country in five years.

What I've learned (from 9/11, the corporate scandals, the fiasco in Iraq, Katrina, the Cheney Administration's insane economic and environmental policies and the relentless dumbing down of the corporate media -- plus the repeated electoral triumphs of the Rovian brand of "reality management") is that the United States is moving down the curve of imperial decay at an amazingly rapid clip. If anything, the speed of our descent appears to be accelerating.

The physical symptoms -- a lost war, a derelict city, a Potemkin memorial hastily erected in a vacant lot -- aren't nearly as alarming as the moral and intellectual paralysis that seems to have taken hold of the system. The old feedback mechanisms are broken or in deep disrepair, leaving America with an opposition party that doesn't know how (or what) to oppose, a military run by uniformed yes men, intelligence czars who couldn't find their way through a garden gate with a GPS locator, TV networks that don't even pretend to cover the news unless there's a missing white woman or a suspected child rapist involved, and talk radio hosts who think nuking Mecca is the solution to all our problems in the Middle East. We've got think tanks that can't think, security agencies that can't secure and accounting firms that can't count (except when their clients ask them to make 2+2=5). Our churches are either annexes to shopping malls, halfway homes for pederasts, or GOP precinct headquarters in disguise. Our economy is based on asset bubbles, defense contracts and an open-ended line of credit from the People's Bank of China, and we still can't push the poverty rate down or the median wage up.

I could happily go on, but I imagine you get my point. It's hard to think of a major American institution, tradition or cultural value that has not, at some point over the past five years, been shown to be a.) totally out of touch, b.) criminally negligent, c.) hopelessly corrupt, d.) insanely hypocritical or e.) all of the above.

It's getting hard to see how these trends can be reversed. Maybe they can't (which would explain why all empires, at least so far, have eventually declined and fallen.) In the past I've used the economic concept of market failure to describe the process whereby dissident voices and uncomfortable views are gradually weeded out of the "marketplace of ideas," allowing errors to go uncorrected, lies to go unchallenged (or ignored) and ideological orthodoxy to calcify into self-delusion:

Watching the punditocracy spin its ideological wheels these days, it's hard not to be reminded of the later years of the Soviet Union -- a nation dedicated to proposition that the marketplace of ideas should never be allowed to clear. As the system declined into senility it, too, became increasingly detached from reality. Soviet pundits and academic ideologues churned out reams of bad ideas and stupid policies. Soviet Krauthammers advised the Politburo to invade Afghanistan. ("It will be a cakewalk.") Soviet [James] Glassmans told it to crank up the central planning. ("Traditional capitalist measures of valuation mean nothing.")

When the public discourse on Edward R. Murrow's old network consists of Katie Couric introducing Rush Limbaugh's buffoonish views, you know the intellectual and ideological rot is well advanced -- maybe not quite as far as the Soviet Union in the '80s, but getting there. One of my favorite books about the Soviet collapse was titled "The Age of Delirium" which I think perfectly captured the progressive insanity of a system that could no longer even understand, much less believe, its own lies. I think of that book practically every time George W. Bush or Dick Cheney or Donald Rumsfeld open their mouths in public.

Some time ago, back when I still had comments on this blog, a jihadi sympathizer left a note on one of my posts bragging about his movement's success in taking down the Soviets -- just as the armies of the Prophet succeeded in taking down the Persian Empire. The new Rome (that is, us) would be next, he boasted.

At the time I thought it was daft -- exactly the kind of thing a crazed religious fanatic would say. But these days I'm not so sure. The jihadis in Afghanistan didn't really take down the Soviet empire -- they just delivered a very hard punch to a giant that was already falling. Looking at the state of America five years after 9/11, it no longer seems completely implausible that the same thing might one day be said of us.

This is not, I know, the most inspiring way to commemorate the fifth anniversary of the event that essentially kicked off the new American century -- which at this point seems unlikely to last even a decade. If you want the standard patriotic rhetoric (hallowed ground, blessings of democracy, forward strategy for freedom, etc.) you'll have no trouble finding it elsewhere. There's no shortage of the stuff today (whitehouse.gov is a good place to start). But I personally don't think the record of the past half decade (or the current condition of Ground Zero) really justifies that kind of self-serving, self-justifying pablum.

Do you?

Idiot-in-chief speaks...

2006-09-11T21:22:00.000-07:00

Bush: “The Safety Of America Depends On The Outcome Of The Battle In The Streets Of Baghdad”...

More on how Ronald Dumsfeld Lost Iraq

2006-09-09T10:35:00.000-07:00

This seems to be a helluva week for confirming BushCo malfeasance that we on the left have been talking about for months or even years. President Bush's speech about moving some high-profile terrorists to Gitmo was also an admission that, yes, our government has been running secret CIA prisons.

Here's another body blow:

Long before the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld forbade military strategists to develop plans for securing a post-war Iraq, the retiring commander of the Army Transportation Corps said Thursday.

In fact, said Brig. Gen. Mark Scheid, Rumsfeld said "he would fire the next person" who talked about the need for a post-war plan.

One of the questions that constantly comes up in looking at the myriad snafus the Bush Administration has unleashed is this: incompetence or malice? (And yes, I know, "both" is a distinct possibility.) This story furninshes some powerful ammunition for the malice alternative.

In 2001, Scheid was a colonel with the Central Command, the unit that oversees U.S. military operations in the Mideast.

On Sept. 10, 2001, he was selected to be the chief of logistics war plans.

On Sept. 11, he said, "life just went to hell."

That day, Gen. Tommy Franks, the commander of Central Command, told his planners, including Scheid, to "get ready to go to war."

A day or two later, Rumsfeld was "telling us we were going to war in Afghanistan and to start building the war plan. We were going to go fast.

"Then, just as we were barely into Afghanistan Rumsfeld came and told us to get ready for Iraq."

Scheid said he remembers everyone thinking, "My gosh, we're in the middle of Afghanistan, how can we possibly be doing two at one time? How can we pull this off? It's just going to be too much."
...
"The secretary of defense continued to push on us that everything we write in our plan has to be the idea that we are going to go in, we're going to take out the regime, and then we're going to leave," Scheid said. "We won't stay."

Scheid said the planners continued to try "to write what was called Phase 4," or the piece of the plan that included post-invasion operations like security, stability and reconstruction.

Even if the troops didn't stay, "at least we have to plan for it," Scheid said.

"I remember the secretary of defense saying that he would fire the next person that said that," Scheid said. "We would not do planning for Phase 4 operations, which would require all those additional troops that people talk about today.

"He said we will not do that because the American public will not back us if they think we are going over there for a long war."

There you have it -- unambiguous, indefensible madness. George Bush and everyone who supports him should be forced to confront this story and explain why the perpetrator of this disaster should not be fired -- at a minimum.

You're doin' a heckuva job, Bushie

2006-09-09T00:08:00.000-07:00

People are beginning to feel sorry for President George W. Bush. And with good reason.

A new poll by Harris Interactive published in the Financial Times reveals that our traditional European allies regard the United States as a much greater threat to world stability than Iran, Iraq, and North Korea.

In European opinion, the axis of evil is Bush’s America.

Almost twice as many British, whose Prime Minister Tony Blair is complicit in Bush’s war crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq, see the US as the greatest threat to world stability than see Iran as the danger. In Spain three times more people regard the US as the threat than see Iran as the threat. Only in Italy does Iran edge out the US as the greatest perceived threat, a result no doubt due to the propaganda that spews from the media empire of Silvio Berlusconi, the Rupert Murdoch of Italy.

Another reason to feel sorry for Bush is because he is regarded by his own political party and his own Attorney General as a war criminal. Republicans recognize that Bush has committed felonies by violating the US War Crimes Act of 1996 (legislation aimed at the likes of Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milosevic). Bush’s Attorney General, Alberto Gonzales, and the Republican Congress have produced draft legislation that aims to protect Bush retroactively by gutting the 1996 War Crimes Act. Republicans hope to quietly pass this unconstitutional legislation before they are defeated in the November elections.

The fact that retroactive law is prohibited by the US Constitution adds to Bush’s shame.

Bush is also pitied because a large majority of Americans no longer believe in the single over-riding cause of Bush’s presidency – the "war on terror." A recent Ipsos-Public Affairs poll released by the Associated Press shows that 60 percent of Americans believe that Bush’s invasion of Iraq has created more terrorism and that Americans are less safe as a result of invading Iraq.

Talking heads on television now discuss whether Bush is an idiot. The frequency of such discussions is likely to increase as Bush makes such declarations as "the battle for Iraq is now central to the ideological struggle of the 21st century."

Bush evokes more pity, because he has lost the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In Iraq, the Kurds in the north have replaced the Iraqi flag with the Kurdish flag. The rest of Iraq is governed by Sunni insurgents or Shi'ite militias. The US puppet government is powerless and dares not leave its US-protected fortified bunker, and on September 5, the dominant Shi'ite political alliance prepared legislation that would divide Iraq into Kurd, Sunni, and Shi'ite autonomous regions.

Apparently, no one has told Bush that he is spending American lives and money on a cause that the Iraqis themselves have abandoned.

Bush still crows about his defeat of the Taliban. Those who have served in the government at high levels wonder every day about Bush’s daily briefing. Does he get one? Who gives it to him? I think Bush’s briefing must come from Dick Cheney, Richard Perle, and William Kristol. Where else could he get such bogus information?

Perhaps Bush’s wife or one of his daughters could smuggle him a copy of the recent report on Afghanistan by the Senlis Council, a security and development policy group that closely monitors the situation in Afghanistan.

According to this report, "Afghanistan is spiraling into uncontrollable violence." The Taliban have regained control over half of the country:

"Despite the international community’s concerted five-year focus on military operations, the security situation in Afghanistan is worse than in 2001. The Taliban now have a strong grip on the southern half of the country. Afghans perceive that the US and NATO troops in southern and eastern Afghanistan are being defeated by the Taliban. The legitimacy of the international community’s presence in Afghanistan is undermined by its incapacity to protect the Afghan population.”

Bush was betrayed by the neoconservatives he appointed, protected, and promoted. Public opinion polls in the Arab and Muslim world show that Bush’s invasions, aggressive stance toward Syria and Iran, and unconditional support for Israeli aggression have created a powerful Islamic political movement that experts say will sweep away the corrupt governments allied with the United States.

The ignorant actions of Bush the Pitiful have marginalized moderate Arabs and destroyed America’s standing both in Muslim lands and the wider world.

Bush has defeated no one, but he has destroyed American’s reputation and his own.

Propaganda Alert!

2006-09-07T12:03:00.000-07:00

FBI Agent Who Consulted On Path to 9/11 Quit Halfway Through Because ‘They Were Making Things Up

James Bamford, an author and journalist who has written about security issues, appeared on MSNBC to discuss “The Path to 9/11.” Bamford revealed that an FBI agent who worked as a consultant to the film quit halfway through production of the mini-series because he believed the writers and producers were “making things up.” Watch it:

Transcript:

BAMFORD: It’s made-up. This is fiction. This is not real. One of my friends actually was a consultant to this production — an FBI agent who worked on 9/11. He quit halfway through because he thought they were making things up.

Write ABC and tell them to tell the truth about 9/11.

Happy Labor Day Oregon

2006-09-04T21:41:00.000-07:00

Courtesy of the Detroit Free Press, here's a handy map showing how far median incomes have dropped over the past six years. And it's good news for most of you: Compared to Michigan and North Carolina you're not doing so badly after all. So stop your sniveling.

Rummy and the Nazis

2006-09-04T14:38:00.000-07:00

Donald Rumsfeld’s Dance With the Nazis
By FRANK RICH

PRESIDENT BUSH came to Washington vowing to be a uniter, not a divider. Well, you win some and you lose some. But there is one member of his administration who has not broken that promise: Donald Rumsfeld. With indefatigable brio, he has long since united Democrats, Republicans, generals and civilians alike in calling for his scalp.

Last week the man who gave us “stuff happens” and “you go to war with the Army you have” outdid himself. In an instantly infamous address to the American Legion, he likened critics of the Iraq debacle to those who “ridiculed or ignored” the rise of the Nazis in the 1930’s and tried to appease Hitler. Such Americans, he said, suffer from a “moral or intellectual confusion” and fail to recognize the “new type of fascism” represented by terrorists. Presumably he was not only describing the usual array of “Defeatocrats” but also the first President Bush, who had already been implicitly tarred as an appeaser by Tony Snow last month for failing to knock out Saddam in 1991.

What made Mr. Rumsfeld’s speech noteworthy wasn’t its toxic effort to impugn the patriotism of administration critics by conflating dissent on Iraq with cut-and-run surrender and incipient treason. That’s old news. No, what made Mr. Rumsfeld’s performance special was the preview it offered of the ambitious propaganda campaign planned between now and Election Day. An on-the-ropes White House plans to stop at nothing when rewriting its record of defeat (not to be confused with defeatism) in a war that has now lasted longer than America’s fight against the actual Nazis in World War II.

Here’s how brazen Mr. Rumsfeld was when he invoked Hitler’s appeasers to score his cheap points: Since Hitler was photographed warmly shaking Neville Chamberlain’s hand at Munich in 1938, the only image that comes close to matching it in epochal obsequiousness is the December 1983 photograph of Mr. Rumsfeld himself in Baghdad, warmly shaking the hand of Saddam Hussein in full fascist regalia. Is the defense secretary so self-deluded that he thought no one would remember a picture so easily Googled on the Web? Or worse, is he just too shameless to care?

Mr. Rumsfeld didn’t go to Baghdad in 1983 to tour the museum. Then a private citizen, he had been dispatched as an emissary by the Reagan administration, which sought to align itself with Iraq in the Iran-Iraq war. Saddam was already a notorious thug. Well before Mr. Rumsfeld’s trip, Amnesty International had reported the dictator’s use of torture — “beating, burning, sexual abuse and the infliction of electric shocks” — on hundreds of political prisoners. Dozens more had been summarily executed or had “disappeared.” American intelligence agencies knew that Saddam had used chemical weapons to gas both Iraqi Kurds and Iranians.

According to declassified State Department memos detailing Mr. Rumsfeld’s Baghdad meetings, the American visitor never raised the subject of these crimes with his host. (Mr. Rumsfeld has since claimed otherwise, but that is not supported by the documents, which can be viewed online at George Washington University’s National Security Archive.) Within a year of his visit, the American mission was accomplished: Iraq and the United States resumed diplomatic relations for the first time since Iraq had severed them in 1967 in protest of American backing of Israel in the Six-Day War.

In his speech last week, Mr. Rumsfeld paraphrased Winston Churchill: Appeasing tyrants is “a bit like feeding a crocodile, hoping it would eat you last.” He can quote Churchill all he wants, but if he wants to self-righteously use that argument to smear others, the record shows that Mr. Rumsfeld cozied up to the crocodile of Baghdad as smarmily as anyone. To borrow the defense secretary’s own formulation, he suffers from moral confusion about Saddam.

Mr. Rumsfeld also suffers from intellectual confusion about terrorism. He might not have appeased Al Qaeda but he certainly enabled it. Like Chamberlain, he didn’t recognize the severity of the looming threat until it was too late. Had he done so, maybe his boss would not have blown off intelligence about imminent Qaeda attacks while on siesta in Crawford.

For further proof, read the address Mr. Rumsfeld gave to Pentagon workers on Sept. 10, 2001 — a policy manifesto he regarded as sufficiently important, James Bamford reminds us in his book “A Pretext to War,” that it was disseminated to the press. “The topic today is an adversary that poses a threat, a serious threat, to the security of the United States of America” is how the defense secretary began. He then went on to explain that this adversary “crushes new ideas” with “brutal consistency” and “disrupts the defense of the United States.” It is a foe “more subtle and implacable” than the former Soviet Union, he continued, stronger and larger and “closer to home” than “the last decrepit dictators of the world.”

And who might this ominous enemy be? Of that, Mr. Rumsfeld was as certain as he would later be about troop strength in Iraq: “the Pentagon bureaucracy.” In love with the sound of his own voice, he blathered on for almost 4,000 words while Mohamed Atta and the 18 other hijackers fanned out to American airports.

Three months later, Mr. Rumsfeld would still be asleep at the switch, as his war command refused to heed the urgent request by American officers on the ground for the additional troops needed to capture Osama bin Laden when he was cornered in Tora Bora. What would follow in Iraq was also more Chamberlain than Churchill. By failing to secure and rebuild the country after the invasion, he created a terrorist haven where none had been before.

That last story is seeping out in ever more incriminating detail, thanks to well-sourced chronicles like “Fiasco,” “Cobra II” and “Blood Money,” T. Christian Miller’s new account of the billions of dollars squandered and stolen in Iraq reconstruction. Still, Americans have notoriously short memories. The White House hopes that by Election Day it can induce amnesia about its failures in the Middle East as deftly as Mr. Rumsfeld (with an assist from John Mark Karr) helped upstage first-anniversary remembrances of Katrina.

One obstacle is that White House allies, not just Democrats, are sounding the alarm about Iraq. In recent weeks, prominent conservatives, some still war supporters and some not, have steadily broached the dread word Vietnam: Chuck Hagel, William F. Buckley Jr. and the columnists Rich Lowry and Max Boot. A George Will column critical of the war so rattled the White House that it had a flunky release a public 2,400-word response notable for its incoherence.

If even some conservatives are making accurate analogies between Vietnam and Iraq, one way for the administration to drown them out is to step up false historical analogies of its own, like Mr. Rumsfeld’s. In the past the administration has been big on comparisons between Iraq and the American Revolution — the defense secretary once likened “the snows of Valley Forge” to “the sandstorms of central Iraq” — but lately the White House vogue has been for “Islamo-fascism,” which it sees as another rhetorical means to retrofit Iraq to the more salable template of World War II.

“Islamo-fascism” certainly sounds more impressive than such tired buzzwords as “Plan for Victory” or “Stay the Course.” And it serves as a handy substitute for “As the Iraqis stand up, we’ll stand down.” That slogan had to be retired abruptly last month after The New York Times reported that violence in Baghdad has statistically increased rather than decreased as American troops handed over responsibilities to Iraqis. Yet the term “Islamo-fascists,” like the bygone “evildoers,” is less telling as a description of the enemy than as a window into the administration’s continued confusion about exactly who the enemy is. As the writer Katha Pollitt asks in The Nation, “Who are the ‘Islamo-fascists’ in Saudi Arabia — the current regime or its religious-fanatical opponents?”

Next up is the parade of presidential speeches culminating in what The Washington Post describes as “a whirlwind tour of the Sept. 11 attack sites”: All Fascism All the Time. In his opening salvo, delivered on Thursday to the same American Legion convention that cheered Mr. Rumsfeld, Mr. Bush worked in the Nazis and Communists and compared battles in Iraq to Omaha Beach and Guadalcanal. He once more interchanged the terrorists who struck the World Trade Center with car bombers in Baghdad, calling them all part of the same epic “ideological struggle of the 21st century.” One more drop in the polls, and he may yet rebrand this mess War of the Worlds.

“Iraq is not overwhelmed by foreign terrorists,” said the congressman John Murtha in succinct rebuttal to the president’s speech. “It is overwhelmed by Iraqis fighting Iraqis.” And with Americans caught in the middle. If we owe anything to those who died on 9/11, it is that we not forget how the administration diverted our blood and treasure from the battle against bin Laden and other stateless Islamic terrorists, fascist or whatever, to this quagmire in a country that did not attack us on 9/11. The number of American dead in Iraq — now more than 2,600 — is inexorably approaching the death toll of that Tuesday morning five years ago.

A public service announcement from your planet

2006-08-27T10:14:00.000-07:00

Quote of the day

2006-08-26T19:29:00.000-07:00

When the fifth anniversary of 9/11 arrives in two weeks, you can bet that the president will once again invoke the Qaeda attacks to justify the Iraq war, especially now that we are adding troops (through the involuntary call-up of reservists) rather than subtracting any. The new propaganda strategy will be right out of Lewis Carroll: If we leave the country that had nothing to do with 9/11, then 9/11 will happen again.
--Frank Rich, New York Times

Quote of the day

2006-08-25T22:32:00.000-07:00

Donald Rumsfeld is still at the helm of the Department of Defense, which is absolutely outrageous. He served up our great military a huge bowl of chicken feces, and ever since then, our military and our country have been trying to turn this bowl into chicken salad. And it’s not working.
--Today on MSNBC, retired General John Batiste — former commander of the First Infantry division in Iraq

Dowd: Can we survive Poppy's fuck-up boy?

2006-08-25T21:17:00.000-07:00

The Bush I inner circle whispers that W. and Condi are “in over their heads,” as one told me, and that without 41, Jim Baker and Brent Scowcroft around, there is no one to “corral” Dick Cheney from his hard-line craziness.

“They misread history,” said one Bush I foreign policy official. “43’s born-again background and lack of experience and simple view of the world made him think it was easy to define who the enemy is. But hope is not a policy — hoping to win, hoping to make a democracy. They came in with the philosophy that the U.S. was the most powerful country in the world and they could remake the world any way they wanted. Condi and others assumed that the Middle East would fall apart peacefully, the way the Soviet Union did, if given a chance. But the Middle East is a totally different place.”

They agree, as one said, that 41 is a “very private guy who loves his son dearly, and you will not catch any daylight between them. I doubt that he’s taking any joy from the fact it’s clear now that he did the right thing in ’91 and his son is screwing up.”

The strains of being a frickin' a**hole

2006-08-24T21:36:00.000-07:00

Bush's press conferences and unscripted remarks are so painfully bad, it spurs the question: what is his PROBLEM?

I think the reason George Bush stumbles, ends sentences midway through to jump to another thought, rattles off non-sequiturs, and makes up words, is that George Bush is breaking under the strain of lying almost all the time about almost everything.

I think it's because lying is hard work, and he's trying to hold several different false scenarios in his head while not blurting out what he's really being told behind closed doors.

Bush looks like a person stumbling over the easiest things, but in fact, he's not a person unable to relate simple facts. He's a person trying hard to NOT relate simple facts. He's a person trying to avoid the pitfalls of saying what's on his mind, and trying to keep his stories straight.

As I lawyer, I see people trying to construct false scenarios all the time. But you don't remember lies the way you remember truth. It's easier to remember, e.g., how fast you were driving than it is to remember the exact lie you told the police officer about how fast you were driving. People who lie have to put a lot of energy into keeping their lies consistent with each other and, well, consistent with undeniable facts.

My grand theory is that Bush's entire presidency, from the beginnings of his campaign until now, is based on his taking public stances that at least obscures goals and positions shared secretly. He and his Roves have always accepted that the majority of the country wouldn't want him if they knew the promises he made to the right wing christians and the rich, if they knew the actual effect of his tax cuts, if they knew the evidence behind environmental damage, and on and on. Now, he's hiding the entire foreign policy fiasco(s), who is being held by him incognito, who is being spied upon, what he knew before 9/11, and on and on and on.

If you had so much to hide, you too would only use canned speeches, carefully vetted by speechwriters who don't know the real story anyway, to keep it all straight, and you would stumble and hem and haw in all other circumstances.

Bush isn't senile, or drug addled. He's a lying asshole. And it's hard work. Only truly gifted and intelligent sociopaths like Rove and Cheney can rattle it off. Bush can't.

2006-08-24T21:33:00.000-07:00

Daily Kos: Why Bush Can't Talk: It's not the drugs, and it's not senility.

Bush's press conferences and unscripted remarks are so painfully bad, it spurs the question: what is his PROBLEM?People have remarked that he wasn't that way when he was the Gover

Israel's desperate narrative

2006-08-23T18:58:00.000-07:00

The other day on CNN's Reliable Sources, Washington Post reporter Tom Ricks revealed the true face of the utter ruthlessness that underlies Israel's actions on the ground in the Middle East:

Howard Kurtz: "And joining us now here [in] Washington [is] Anne Compton who covers the White House for ABC News, and Thomas Ricks, Pentagon reporter for the Washington Post and author of the new book Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq. Tom Ricks, you've covered a number of military conflicts, including Iraq, as I just mentioned. Is civilian casualties increasingly going to be a major media issue? In conflicts where you don't have two standing armies shooting at each other?"

Thomas Ricks, reporter, Washington Post: "I think it will be. But I think civilian casualties are also part of the battlefield play for both sides here. One of the things that is going on, according to some U.S. military analysts, is that Israel purposely has left pockets of Hezbollah rockets in Lebanon, because as long as they're being rocketed, they can continue to have a sort of moral equivalency in their operations in Lebanon."

Kurtz: "Hold on, you're suggesting that Israel has deliberately allowed Hezbollah to retain some of its fire power, essentially for PR purposes, because having Israeli civilians killed helps them in the public relations war here?"

Ricks: "Yes, that's what military analysts have told me."

Kurtz: "That's an extraordinary testament to the notion that having people on your own side killed actually works to your benefit in that nobody wants to see your own citizens killed but it works to your benefit in terms of the battle of perceptions here."

Ricks: "Exactly. It helps you with the moral high ground problem, because you know your operations in Lebanon are going to be killing civilians as well."

Just when you thought Israel's high moral ground couldn't get any lower, they go and do something like this. Maintaining the moral high ground is always a dicey matter for a brazen aggressor, but making sure some of your own civilians die as you wantonly slaughter your neighbors is unique in the annals of war propaganda. Not even the Nazis pulled crap like that.

I don't like to make such comparisons, but in view of Ricks' reportage it is clearly not hyperbole. And so what has been the response of the Israelis and their American amen corner? On a later program, Howard Kurtz had this to say:

"One other note. On Reliable Sources two weeks ago, Washington Post Pentagon reporter Tom Ricks said he'd been told by U.S. military analysts that Israel was leaving some Hezbollah rocket launchers intact because the killing of Israeli civilians provided an image of moral equivalency in the war. Post editor Len Downie, responding to a letter from former New York mayor Ed Koch, says he told Ricks he should not have made those statements.

"Ricks told the New York Sun that he accurately reported the comments from analysts but that, quote, 'I wish I hadn't said them, and I intend from now on to keep my mouth shut about it.'"

Translation: What I said is true, and I promise never to say it again.

Here is a textbook example of what scholars John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt call "the Lobby" in action, and some pretty quick action at that. No sooner had Ricks' comments hit the airwaves than the Lobby went into overdrive, screeching the old familiar refrain, the standard response to any suggestion of Israeli government perfidy: "Blood libel!"

That was their "rebuttal" to professors Mearsheimer and Walt when they wrote that the Lobby has effectively seized control of American foreign policy. They've always come back with the "blood libel" canard when confronted with footage of IDF soldiers shooting at Palestinian teenagers armed with slingshots. That was their reply when Fox News' Carl Cameron reported that the Israelis may have had foreknowledge of the 9/11 terrorist attacks and not told us. It's their stock answer when backed against a wall, and I doubt that anyone takes it seriously anymore.

Besides which, the average human being, reading former New York mayor Ed Koch's blovation addressed to Ricks' editor, hasn't the foggiest idea what a "blood libel" is, historically. Even given this arcane knowledge, how is accusing Israelis of sacrificing their own children the equivalent of the old "blood libel" – which averred that Jews used the blood of Christian children in a religious ceremony involving the making of matzohs? (See, I told you it was obscure, not to mention weird). The difference is that the "blood libel" was popularized by crazed anti-Semites in Czarist Russia, while Ricks was citing "a senior Israeli official." That official, and not Ricks, is the proper object of Mayor Big Mouth's ire. But let's be clear: Ricks' only sin is letting the cat out of the bag.

Koch's letter is revealing in more ways than he intends. In his usual, overwrought style, he tells us that when he first heard Ricks' statements about the IDF deliberately risking Israeli casualties for the sake of public relations,

"I was shocked. … Still, I thought to myself, anything is possible in a war. There are crazy people on both sides of every war, but, Dear God, I hope this never happened."

In other words: he was shocked precisely because he found Ricks' reporting all too believable. As do I.

The reason I believe it is due to the unique position of Israel as a settler state, i.e., a foreign graft affixed to a Middle Eastern tree. While not denying the historical attachment of the Jewish people to Palestine, what I mean to say is that the impetus for the creation of the Jewish state came primarily from abroad: Zionism was a movement founded in the ghettos of Eastern Europe, not a national liberation movement spawned in the Holy Land itself. As such, it has always depended on foreign support, and not only from the Diaspora: military aid from the United States is central to its survival strategy. That's why media coverage, and "the narrative," is so important to the Israelis – important enough to sacrifice a few of their own on the altar of "public relations."

Leave it to the Huffington Post to chime in with the New York Sun, actually celebrating the silencing of a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter. And Hollywood is not far behind, with a recent full-page ad in the Los Angeles Times, paid for by Israeli gazillionaire Haim Saban, that attacks the Lebanese for daring to defend themselves and makes no mention of the 1,300-plus Lebanese victims of Israeli aggression. Tears for Darfur, but none for Beirut: that's the "liberal" wing of the Amen Corner for you.

In his interview with Kurtz, Ricks had this to say:

Kurtz: "Tom Ricks, the New York Times reported the other day, quote, 'Israel is now fighting to win the battle of perceptions,' which to me says the battle of headlines. And, in fact, an Israeli cabinet minister was quoted, not by name, as saying, 'That the narrative at the end, is part of the problem.' I'm starting to hear echoes of Iraq."

Ricks: "Echoes of Iraq, yes. But also the Israelis are very sophisticated in their handling of the media. They consider it part of the battlefield, officially. The word 'narrative' always comes up with conversations with Israeli national security officials. They consider shaping the narrative, the battle for the narrative, to be key as part of any war fighting. So they see the media as part of the battlefield. And, in fact, there's some belief from our reporters that they have occasionally targeted the media."

Sure they've targeted the media, and not only on the battlefield – you'll notice that Koch and CAMERA didn't dispute this rather more sensational accusation – but in this country as well. That's what organizations like CAMERA are all about. The minute you say anything about Israel that (a) is true and (b) discredits the Jewish state, a tremendous ruckus is raised, and no slimeball is spared in the slinging. After all, if they'll sacrifice their own citizens for the sake of "the narrative," then what won't they do to foreign reporters who have the gall to expose their methods?

The "narrative" Israel is trying to sell the American public is that the Jewish state is once again being targeted by "terrorists" – yet the pictures coming out of Lebanon show us who the real terrorists are, no matter how hard CAMERA and its allies, including AIPAC, work to "spin" the story in a more favorable direction. Their only alternative is to go into denial mode and claim that the photos are "staged" – a macabre tactic that mocks both the living and the dead. In the case of Ricks' reporting, they can only harass his editor until he issues a one-sentence "rebuke" – in an exercise of power that the Lobby always denies having. Because, you understand, to even write about how they engineered this "rebuke" is, in itself, a "blood libel." (Justin Raimondo @ antiwar.com)

Is Bush An Idiot?

2006-08-16T10:30:00.000-07:00

Is this really debatable?

The Bushies have gone bat-sh*t crazy

2006-08-11T12:47:00.000-07:00

Hard on the heels of the New York Times editorial blasting Bu$hCo for being political opportunists, using terror threats to advance their agenda, comes another such broadside from The Philadelphia Inquirer:

THESE PEOPLE have no shame. Their contempt for democracy is so great they will stop at nothing to undermine it. Their adherence to fundamentalist beliefs that blinds them to reality is frightening. They must be stopped.

And that's just the Republicans.

While our Vacationer-in-Chief and his vice president shut down dissent, and discourage questions about the way our government has directed our intelligence and military resources toward a single target in Iraq, we are no closer to understanding or dismantling the threat of al Qaeda.

Cheney's remarks underscore just how unsophisticated our understanding of terrorism is. We have no more understanding of the global forces at work that lead so many to want to bomb and destroy innocent lives than we did five years ago.

Has Cheney completely lost it?

Just be sure to take your medicine before the plane takes off, Unka Dickie! You wouldn't want to be treated like a terrorist.

But I digress.

To exploit a very real terror threat that could have led to major casualties, and to even indirectly implicate Americans who were exercising their democratic right by going to the polls and making a choice borders on the criminal, to say nothing of the insane.
Cheney's comments came out a day before British intelligence officials announced they had thwarted a major terrorist attack. Surely Cheney was aware of the plot and the work to thwart it, and was no doubt aware of the timing of yesterday's announcement.

The Guardian confirms both Blair and Bush had prior knowledge of the plot, so there is every reaqson to believe that Cheney - and Rove - did as well.

WaPo columnist Eugene Robinson puts this insidious political opportunism into the common traveller's perspective:

When unsmiling agents at the airport take away your contact lens solution, your toothpaste, and your cologne or after-shave, remember Osama bin Laden.

Remember the real war on terrorism that the Bush administration and its allies
decided not to fight, preferring cowboy-style military adventures.

The plot demonstrates that al-Qaeda lives on, either as a functioning organization or, even more chillingly, as an inspiration to jihadists around the world. If only the president would fight that war. If only he hadn't turned away from the hunt for bin Laden to chase his neocon advisers' delusions of spreading pro-American democracy at the point of a gun.
Maybe the discovery of the airliner plot will bring us back to the real world. There are deadly enemies out there, and one way to fight them, as the British demonstrated yesterday, is through intelligence. One way not to fight them, as the Bush administration continues to demonstrate, is through reckless military action that may kill terrorists but also kills innocent civilians and thus creates a new generation of terrorists -- doubtless including some bright young man or woman who will come up with a new idea for downing civilian airliners.

Shoe bombs didn't work, and now we shuffle through the metal detectors in our socks.

Liquid explosives didn't work, and now we will fly with unbrushed teeth.

We can be sure that somewhere in some anonymous apartment, maybe in Paris or Frankfurt or Karachi, a group of unknown conspirators has absorbed the failure of the London plot and already begun to develop a new approach to mass murder.

We will end up boarding our flights barefoot, barehanded and buck naked except for a hospital gown they'll make us put on at the airport.

Osama bin Laden will be watching CNN from his cave, smiling contentedly. As will Dick and Brain, safely isolated in the Sekrit Hidey-hole Oval Office while Da Prez hacks at the tumbleweeds in Crawford.

We have met the enemy and he is Rush

2006-07-31T21:17:00.000-07:00

"Until civilians -- frankly, I'm not sure how many of them are actually just innocent little civilians running around versus active Hezbo types, particularly the men -- but until those civilians start paying a price for propping up these kinds of regimes, it's not going to end, folks. What do you mean, civilians start paying a price? I just ask you to consult history for the answer to that.”
Rush Limbaugh
On the Qana Massacre
July 31, 2006

"We declared jihad against the US government, because the US government is unjust, criminal and tyrannical. It has committed acts that are extremely unjust, hideous and criminal . . . As for what you asked regarding the American people, they are not exonerated from responsibility, because they chose this government and voted for it despite their knowledge of its crimes in Palestine, Lebanon, Iraq and in other places."
Osama bin Laden
On His Fatwa Against America
March 1997

I've always wondered when Limbaugh would finally figure out which side he belongs on.

2006-07-29T23:50:00.000-07:00

When Did Israel's Foreign Policy Becomes Ours?

2006-07-20T22:56:00.000-07:00

President Harry Truman took about 20 minutes to recognize the state of Israel when it declared independence in 1948. Since then, more than 58 years of war, terrorism and blood-letting have led to the events of the past week. -Lou Dobbs

My country has been "torn to shreds," said Fouad Siniora, the prime minister of Lebanon, as the death toll among his people passed 300 civilian dead, 1,000 wounded, with half a million homeless.

Israel must pay for the "barbaric destruction," said Siniora.

To the contrary, says columnist Lawrence Kudlow, "Israel is doing the Lord's work."

On American TV, former Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu says the ruination of Lebanon is Hezbollah's doing. But is it Hezbollah that is using U.S.-built F-16s, with precision-guided bombs, and 155-mm artillery pieces to wreak death and devastation on Lebanon?

No, Israel is doing this, with the blessing and without a peep of protest from President Bush. And we wonder why they hate us.

"Today, we are all Israelis!" brayed Ken Mehlman of the Republican National Committee to a gathering of Christians United for Israel.

One wonders if these Christians care about what is happening to our Christian brethren in Lebanon and Gaza, who have had all power cut off by Israeli air strikes, an outlawed form of collective punishment, that has left them with no sanitation, rotting food, impure water, and days without light or electricity in the horrible heat of July.

When summer power outrages occur in America, it means a rising rate of death among our sick and elderly, and women and infants. One can only imagine what a hell it must be today in Gaza City and Beirut.

But all this carnage and destruction has only piqued the blood lust of the hairy-chested warriors at The Weekly Standard. In a signed editorial, "It's Our War," William Kristol calls for America to play her rightful role in this war by "countering this act of aggression by Iran with a military strike against Iranian nuclear facilities. Why wait?"

"Why wait?" Well, one reason is that the United States has not been attacked. A second is a small thing called the Constitution. Where does George W. Bush get the authority to launch a war on Iran? When did Congress declare war or authorize a war on Iran?

Answer: It never did. But these neoconservatives care no more about the Constitution than they cared about the truth when they lied us into war in Iraq.

"Why wait?" How about thinking of the fate of those 25,000 Americans in Lebanon if we launch an unprovoked war on Iran? How many would wind up dead or hostages of Hezbollah, if Iran gave the order to retaliate for the slaughter of their citizens by U.S. bombs? What would happen to the 130,000 U.S. troops in Iraq, if Shi'ites and Iranian "volunteers" joined forces to exact revenge on our soldiers?

What about America? Richard Armitage, who did four tours in Nam and knows a bit about war, says that, in its ability to attack Western targets, al-Qaeda is the B team, Hezbollah the A Team. If Bush bombs Iran, what prevents Hezbollah from launching retaliatory attacks inside the United States?

None of this is written in defense of Hamas, Hezbollah, or Iran.

But none of them has attacked our country, nor has Syria, whom Bush I made an ally in the Gulf War, and to whom the most decorated soldier in Israeli history, Ehud Barak, offered 99 percent of the Golan Heights. If Nixon, Bush I, and Clinton could deal with Hafez al-Assad, a tougher customer than son Bashar, what is the matter with George W. Bush?

The last superpower is impotent in this war because we have allowed Israel to dictate to whom we may and may not talk. Thus, Bush winds up cussing in frustration in St. Petersburg that somebody should tell the Syrians to stop it. Why not pick up the phone, Mr. President?

What is Kristol's moral and legal ground for a war on Iran? It is the "Iranian act of aggression" against Israel, and that Iran is on the road to nuclear weapons, and we can't have that.

But there is no evidence Iran has any tighter control over Hezbollah than we have over Israel, whose response to the capture of two soldiers had all the spontaneity of the Schlieffen Plan. And, again, Hezbollah attacked Israel, not us. And there is no solid proof Iran is in violation of the nuclear nonproliferation treaty, which it has signed but Israel refuses to sign.

If Iran's nuclear program justifies war, why cannot the neocons make that case in the constitutional way, instead of prodding Bush to launch a Pearl Harbor attack? Do they fear they have no credibility left after pushing Bush into this bloody quagmire in Iraq that has cost almost 2,600 dead and 18,000 wounded Americans?

No, Kenny boy, we are not "all Israelis." Some of us still think of ourselves as Americans, first, last, and always. And, no, Mr. Kristol, this is not "our war." It's your war.

The Bush Economy

2006-07-20T12:02:00.000-07:00

Bonddad at Daily Kos provides some free advice to Democrats on the Bush economy. His message, in short:

THE WORST RATE OF JOB CREATION IN 40 YEARS

BUSH'S NEW JOBS PAY $9000 LESS PER YEAR.

WORKING PEOPLE HAVEN'T HAD A RAISE IN 5 YEARS...

And then this:
The BLS's wage figures for the second quarter are out(pdf):

Median weekly earnings of the nation's 105.9 million full-time wage and salary workers were $659 in the second quarter of 2006, the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the U.S. Department of Labor reported today. This was 2.5 percent higher than a year earlier, compared with a gain of 4.0 percent in the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U) over the same period.

In other words, after inflation the median worker is earning 1.5% less than the same time last year. And that is using an inflation number which underestimates inflation somewhat. It's not a huge decrease, but when you consider that this is the boom period of this business cycle and that people have been taking on debt to increase spending and to pay the interest on loans, suddenly it doesn't look so good.

2006-07-06T23:21:00.000-07:00

Why Conservatives Can't Govern

2006-07-06T23:13:00.000-07:00

Search hard enough and you might find a pundit who believes what George W. Bush believes, which is that history will redeem his administration. But from just about everyone else, on the right as vehemently as on the left, the verdict has been rolling in: This administration, if not the worst in American history, will soon find itself in the final four. Even those who appeal to history's ultimate judgment halfheartedly acknowledge as much. One seeks tomorrow's vindication only in the context of today's dismal performance.

About the only failure more pronounced than the president's has been the graft-filled plunder of GOP lawmakers--at least according to opinion polls, which in May gave the GOP-controlled Congress favorability ratings in the low 20s, about 10 points lower than the president's. This does not necessarily translate into electoral Armageddon; redistricting and other incumbency-protection devices help protect against that. But even if many commentators think that Republicans may retain control over Congress, very few think they should.

Eager to salvage conservatism from the wreckage of conservative rule, right-wing pundits are furiously blaming right-wing politicians for failing to adhere to right-wing convictions. Libertarians such as Bruce Bartlett fret that under Republican control, government has not shrunk, as conservatives prescribe, but has grown. Insiders like Peggy Noonan complain that Republicans have become--well, insiders; they are too focused on retaining power and too disconnected from the base whose anger pushed them into power. Idealistic younger conservatives bewail the care and feeding of the K Street beast. Paleocons Pat Buchanan and Robert Novak blame neocons William Kristol and Charles Krauthammer for the debacle that is Iraq. Through all these laments there pulsates a sense of desperation: A conservative president and an even more conservative Congress must be repudiated to enable genuine conservatism to survive. Sure, the Bush administration has failed, all these voices proclaim. But that is because Bush and his Republican allies in Congress borrowed big government and foreign-policy idealism from the left. The ideas of Woodrow Wilson and John Maynard Keynes, from their point of view, have always been flawed. George W. Bush and Tom DeLay just prove it one more time.

Conservative dissidents seem to have done an admirable job of persuading each other of the truth of their claims. Of course, many of these dissidents extolled the president's conservative leadership when he was riding high in the polls. But the real flaw in their argument is akin to that of Trotskyites who, when confronted with the failures of communism in Cuba, China and the Soviet Union, would claim that real communism had never been tried. If leaders consistently depart in disastrous ways from their underlying political ideology, there comes a point where one has to stop just blaming the leaders and start questioning the ideology.
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2006/0607.wol...

Lay's Legacy

2006-07-05T22:23:00.000-07:00

Ken Lay may have died this morning, but what he stood for, unfortunately, is alive and thriving.
Lay's core belief was that everything should be treated like a commodity. Electricity, natural gas, water, everything on earth -- and the spoils go to the trader who can rig the highest price. Lay's notion that even the most fundamental necessities of life should be bought and sold is an operating principle today from Wall Street to Capitol Hill.

Happy Fourth of July!

2006-07-04T11:50:00.000-07:00

A couple of great, progressive takes on Independence Day:

E. J. Dionne Jr.:

You can be certain that on this, as on every July 4th, patriotic oratory will flow as well from liberals declaring their love of flag, country and the Declaration of Independence. Many will speak of how our constitutional republic is to be revered especially for its guarantees of liberty and justice for all and — hint, hint — limits on the powers of overreaching monarchs.

But the progressive and the reformer have a problem with what passes for unadulterated patriotism. By nature, the reformer is bound to insist that the country, however glorious, is not a perfect place, that it is capable of doing wrong as well as right. The nation that declared "all men are created equal" was, at the time those words were written, the home of an extensive system of slavery.

Most reformers guard their patriotic credentials by moving quickly to the next logical step: that the true genius of America has always been its capacity for self-correction. I’d assert that this is a better argument for patriotism than any effort to pretend that the Almighty has marked us as the world’s first flawless nation.

John Kerry:

I think patriotism starts with telling the truth. Truth is the American bottom line. I don’t think it’s an accident that among the first words of the first declaration of our national existence it is proclaimed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident…".

Patriotism also means dissent — when it’s hardest. The bedrock of America’s greatest advances–the foundation of what we know today are defining values–was formed not by cheering on things as they were, but by taking them on and demanding change. […]

So, on this Fourth of July, the bottom line is that we will only be stronger if we reclaim America’s true character and strength — if we declare our independence from a politics that lets America down –if we truly commit ourselves to the big hearted patriotism determined "to ‘make it right’ and "keep it right" once again.

Single -payer Health Insurance:Catching up with Canada

2006-07-04T11:29:00.000-07:00

Health Care is one of the most serious underlying problems of the current US economy. Currently about 11% of Americans have no health insurance. The total number of uninsured has increased from 40.9 million is 2001 to 45 million in 2005 - a 10% increase. Health insurance premiums are rising at least twice the rate of inflation and in a few recent years they have increased 4 times the inflation rate. In short, this is a huge problem. However, there is an answer -- single-payer health insurance. As I outline below, it is cheaper, better and increases US competitiveness.

I will leave the proper framing of this issue more able political strategists. However, the time has come for all Americans to have access to basic health care.

There are several reasons why Single Payer is the best solution to the problem.

First, public health is cheaper. The Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development studied the health expenses of all member countries - 29 in all including the United States. The median amount of GDP spent on health care of 29 countries has fluctuated between 7.9 and 8.4 for 2000-2003. For 2000-2003, US health expense as a percentage of GDP was 13.1%, 13.8%, 14.6% and 15% respectively - by far the highest total of all countries. Germany was the next most expensive country and their totals for the same years (2000-2003) were 10.6%, 10.8%, 10.9%, 11.1%, respectively. So, as a percentage of GDP basis, the US spends between 34% and 75% more as a percentage of GDP than countries that rely primarily on public funds to provide health service.

The OECD also breaks health expenses down into amount spent per capita. For the last four years (2000-2003), the median per capital expense for 29 OECD countries ranged from $2010 to 2248. Over the same years, the US once again spent more than any other OECD country, with figures for 2000-2003 of $4539, $4888, $5287 and $5635. Over the same time, Switzerland ranked second in per capita expenditures and Germany third. It's important to notice that the US's private health care system routinely spends at least twice as much per person than other countries with public health systems.

So, the US spends the most on health care. Our system must provide some incredible benefits! Actually, the US benefits are below median for all OECD countries. In 1990, the median life expectancy of males and females for all OECD countries 75.5 years, while the US' number was 75.3. In 2000, the OECD median life expectancy was 78 and the US's was 76.8. In 2003, the OECD's number was 78.5 and the US' was n77.2. For the years 2000-2003, the OECD's infant mortality rate as expressed as number of deaths per 1000 decreased from 5.1 in 2000 to 4.3 in 2003. In contrast, the US' numbers increased from 6.9 in 2000 to 7 in 2003.

Countries with public health insurance spend less per GDP and per capita on health expenses, they live longer, and fewer infants die. That sounds damn good to me, but then again I like facts instead of faith.

OECD Link

The second reason why single-payer is better is it cuts down on overall administrative costs. Kash at Angry Bear offers this analysis

We have a couple of estimates of how high administrative costs are - i.e., expenses incurred by the health care system to do things other than to provide health care services. One prominent study that appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2003 estimated that the cost of administering the US's health care system was about $300bn in 1999. A more recent study in the International Journal of Health Services found that in 2003, administration costs in the US health care system ate up about $400bn, or about 25% of total health care spending.
By comparison, national health care systems incur administrative costs of a few percent of total health expenditures: according to the NEJM study Canada's national health insurance system spends just 1.3% on overhead, and the US's Medicare and Medicaid programs have administrative costs of between 2-5%.

Currently, the US health system is a hodge-podge of numerous insurance companies with differing layers of paperwork that work against efficiency. The US public system spends 25% less on administration costs.

The third reason single-payer health is better is economic competitiveness. As the OECD study points out, the US is only 1 of three member countries that does not have public health care. Because of the high cost of US health care, US companies are at an extreme competitive disadvantage caused by these high costs. Because single-payer removes this cost from the companies balance sheet, cash is freed to invest in other more productive applications. Companies clearly approve of single-payer, as evidenced by this letter from General Motors about the Canadian health system:

"The Canadian plan has been a significant advantage for investing in Canada," says GM Canada spokesman David Patterson, noting that in the United States, GM spends $1,400 per car on health benefits. Indeed, with the provinces sharing 75 percent of the cost of Canadian healthcare, it's no surprise that GM, Ford and Chrysler have all been shifting car production across the border at such a rate that the name "Motor City" should belong to Windsor, not Detroit.
Just two years ago, GM Canada's CEO Michael Grimaldi sent a letter co-signed by Canadian Autoworkers Union president Buzz Hargrave to a Crown Commission considering reforms of Canada's 35-year-old national health program that said, "The public healthcare system significantly reduces total labour costs for automobile manufacturing firms, compared to their cost of equivalent private insurance services purchased by U.S.-based automakers." That letter also said it was "vitally important that the publicly funded healthcare system be preserved and renewed, on the existing principles of universality, accessibility, portability, comprehensiveness and public administration," and went on to call not just for preservation but for an "updated range of services." CEOs of the Canadian units of Ford and DaimlerChrysler wrote similar encomiums endorsing the national health system.

These business leaders see the clear advantage of a single-payer health system. When US leaders see the same advantages, they will slowly come on board.

A system that is cheaper, better and increases national competitiveness is a winning situation for all involved. It's time the Democrats started to make the case along these lines to the American people.

For a further explanation of some of this information, see Angry Bear's website. He has an entire series on the left-hand side titled Health Care http://angrybear.blogspot.com/